Paradise Drawing Suite ( 2023 - 2025 )

In Paradise, Robert Lucy draws us into a realm where beauty is charged with symbolism, and memory is rendered in lush, hallucinatory detail. Each portrait begins with a vintage photograph, either anonymous or inherited, and blossoms into a surreal reverie through Lucy’s precise, layered use of colored pencil.

The figures emerge from otherworldly botanicals, glowing atmospheres, anatomical overlays, and cryptic landscapes. These are not mere illustrations of the natural world, but reimaginings: hybrids of masculinity and vulnerability, queer identity and archetype, spirit and structure.

Those depicted in Paradise are neither wholly of the past nor the present. They are vessels for tenderness, resilience, eroticism, and mythology: beings transformed by coral, crowned with lichen, submerged in northern lights or adorned by jellyfish.

Lucy invites us to reconsider portraiture not as representation, but as invocation. These are sacred hybrids: memory gardens blooming with personal iconography, gender fluidity, grief, and joy.

With each work, Paradise proposes a gentle question: What would it look like to truly belong to the natural world: to be changed by it, adorned by it, and held within it?