The Artist
Lucas Underwood was born in Iowa and raised there, in Colorado, and in North County San Diego, California. He returned to Iowa to attend the University of Iowa, where he earned a degree in Journalism and began training in photography. After graduating, he served in the Peace Corps in Panama, taught English in Spain, and travelled extensively, documenting his experiences through photography. Later he worked as an assistant and apprentice at the Lasansky Gallery and Studio in Iowa City. There he learned traditional intaglio printmaking techniques and approaches that involved photographic etching. Lucas earned his M.F.A. in photography at the University of Georgia and continued to develop diverse means of photographic reproduction.
The major theme of Lucas’ work relates to how we are shaped by our environment, and includes issues relating to masculinity, perceptions of beauty, and belonging. Lucas’ work has been in shows and is in private collections across the United States. Currently Lucas resides in Vancouver WA.
The Work
Photography captures the immediacy of a moment and preserves nuances of personalities, contexts, and situations in time. My photographs portray people I know and the places I visit. As a photographer, I learned that to record a moment is a way of synthesizing a complex story into a representative image. The use of collage, printmaking, and alternative photographic processes allows me to depart from a moment captured in time, break it down, and carefully reconstruct and represent it reconstruct through a manual, craft-driven process. I was initiated to the importance of craft by my father through finish carpentry. These skills, learned working with wood, have helped me immensely in my image-making process.
The medium I use most regularly in my collage pieces are cut from maps. Conceptually, maps are embedded with meaning depending on a viewer’s knowledge or experience with a place. Visually, maps add unexpected textures, patterns, and colors to the image. These visual qualities distance the image from the language of photography while evoking a sense of place. The places where we are born, live, and travel shape who we are. The importance of place and our relationship to history is contained within my work.