Lilyan Stark

I Push My Fingers Into My Eyes

I am a curious painter who is currently enthralled with trying to grasp the transient nature of contemporary pop culture, and how something that seems so colossal can be so quickly forgotten. Through the medium of oil painting, I can – unabashed and uninterrupted – show the world what was once culturally significant to a specific generation and ultimately subvert society’s ingrained notion of what’s acceptable to enjoy, rejecting the notion of uncool through some fun paintings.

My formative years spent slouching behind a screen were really fruitful. I sat in the passenger seat of a ride that provided an abundance of unique, diverse youth subcultures now rendered obsolete with ridicule – like an unspoken taboo. The once-booming subculture of Nu-Metal music, dominant during the turn of the millennium, is a great example of that phenomenon. Nu-Metal was the soundtrack to a generation of misunderstood, disenfranchised juvenile freaks who were afraid of their uncertain future. Nu-Metal appealed to that self-imposed, self-pitying outcast demographic and endured mass mainstream success for a number of years. But this testosterone-fuelled Rap-Rock bastard child of a movement soon faded into alienated territory and became taboo. With the help of discernible and familiar media from this Millennial era via the Internet, I poeticise the angsty ‘white boy’ archetype who is typically lumped in with this once irreverent and now irrelevant subculture.

Limp Bizkit were one of the biggest bands in the world 20 years ago.

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Break Stuff (Lyrics), 2020
Oil on canvas
500mm x 700mm x 15mm

My Own Summer (Shove It), 2020
Oil on canvas
400mm x 400mm x 15mm

One Step Closer, 2020
Oil on canvas
400mm x 500mm x 15mm

One Step Closer II, 2020
Oil on canvas
400mm x 500mm x 15mm

Last Resort, 2020
Oil on canvas
500mm x 600mm x 15mm

Sugar, 2020
Oil on canvas
500mm x 700mm x 15mm