Lauren Moses
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 6
- 5 min read
Lauren Moses is a painter who lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia. She studied History at the University of Virginia before earning a degree in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work is inspired by classical and mythological themes, rethinking those old stories through a modern lens. Over the years, she’s shown her paintings across the U.S., including at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art and Second Street Gallery. In her recent work, she explores change, memory, and the pull between beauty and control.
Q: Your paintings keep shifting and changing. What draws you to that ongoing process of transformation?
A: What fascinates me most is the temporality of form. Nothing is ever truly static. In my work, the process of transformation reflects a belief that identity, memory, and perception are inherently fluid. Each shift in a painting is a small metamorphosis, a negotiation between emergence and disappearance.
I draw on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, especially in the way the myths dramatize change as both violent and poetic. In Stephanie McCarter’s translation, Ovid’s transformations are never terminal; they are thresholds, liminal states between one form and another. The agony of change and the mystery of what emerges become inseparable. (See “Should Ovid’s Metamorphoses Have a Trigger Warning?”)¹
In my paintings, I try to evoke that sense: not just things being “made” or “unmade,” but the tension and energy in between. I lean into that unstable middle ground because it feels more alive.
So what draws me is the possibility of ongoing becoming. The painting at one moment can hold contradictory states, fading, returning, reconfiguring. By refusing a fixed, polished endpoint, I want each piece to continue resonating, to invite the viewer into the space of transformation itself.
Q: You often reach back to classical or religious imagery. What makes those symbols still feel alive to you?
A: Those images were never neutral; they were designed to carry power, to idealize or to control. By reaching back to them, I’m not trying to revive their authority, but to sort through the legacy they’ve left us. These myths and icons are still embedded in our culture, from art history to advertising, and their influence continues to shape how bodies, beauty, and desire are imagined.
What makes them alive for me is not their permanence, but their persistence. Even as times change, the symbols resurface, often unconsciously, in new guises.
By painting with and against them, I want to expose both their endurance and their instability, to show how something revered can also be reconfigured, unsettled, or undone.
So it’s less about nostalgia than it is about inquiry, taking the inherited language of allegory and iconography, and reframing it in a way that acknowledges both its seduction and its violence.
Q: There’s a tension between control and openness in your work. How do you find that balance when you paint?
A: I don’t think about it consciously as “finding balance,” but the work is completely bound up in those kinds of oppositions, because that’s how my mind works. I’m always wrestling with contradictions: good and evil, purity and corruption, beauty and violence, faith and doubt. What interests me is less the clarity of one side or the other than the confusing gray area in between.
Painting gives me a way to inhabit that space. I move between precision and improvisation, containment and dissolution. A figure may be carefully drawn and then blurred out, or an allegory may emerge only to fracture again. The canvas becomes a place where control and openness are constantly in dialogue, where neither ever fully wins.
For me, that instability isn’t something to resolve but something that keeps an open dialogue. Not only within the painting itself, but also with the viewer, who completes the work by lingering in that tension.
Q: When you cover and repaint a surface, does it ever feel like the painting is leading you instead?
A: All the time. That back-and-forth is the heart of my process. I might begin with a reference, but once I start covering, scraping, repainting, the surface takes on its own momentum. What’s buried leaves traces that shape the next layer, and I often find myself following those cues rather than directing them.
For me, that’s the most alive part of painting, when the work resists control and pushes me into unexpected territory. It’s less about imposing an image than about being responsive, letting the painting argue back and surprise me.
Q: Writers like Ovid and Angela Carter seem close to your world. What connects you to their storytelling?
A: What I connect to in both Ovid and Angela Carter is the way they take inherited stories and show them as unstable, charged, and endlessly open to retelling. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is never just about transformation as a neat resolution; it’s about thresholds where beauty and violence, desire and grief overlap. Carter, in her own way, exposes those same mythic and fairy-tale structures through a feminist lens, revealing the power dynamics underneath, while also infusing them with wit, strangeness, and dark humor.
I love that combination of brutality and play, of the uncanny right alongside the comic. Their storytelling never flattens into a single meaning. It’s layered, contradictory, and complex. Ambiguity is a deliberate device in both of their work, and that sensibility resonates with me. In my own paintings, I’m not interested in illustrating myths but in reframing them, opening them to new readings. I’m drawn to that same entanglement of seduction and brutality, seriousness and oddity, and to the way ambiguity can hold multiple meanings at once without resolving them.
Q: Some of your work embraces mistakes and reworking. What does that kind of freedom mean for you in the studio?
A: All of my work embraces failure, mistakes, reworking, and continued wrestling with the surface. That push and pull with material and ideas isn’t something I correct for. This is the work. Each misstep becomes part of the vocabulary of the painting, a layer that unsettles what came before and opens the possibility of something unexpected.
I believe wholeheartedly in beginner’s mind: in unknowing, unlearning, even deskilling as a way to stay open. It keeps me in dialogue with my subconscious rather than trying to impose control or mastery. Without that freedom, there would be no painting, only execution. For me, the risk and uncertainty are what give the work its urgency.