By Nancy Barr
Contributing Writer

Have you noticed? Hugs are back. 

Yes, we may be wearing masks on occasion or even daily, but a worldwide pandemic taught us that life lived at 6 feet of distance is not worth living, and that human beings require daily hugs — many in fact, for good health. Whether it means holding someone who is going through difficulty or sharing eye contact and a greeting with a stranger, by now many of us have received the memo and accepted the brief. We sense that humanity is in danger and that one way to save ourselves is through care for each other.

With “Embrace,” her exhibit of new paintings at Pyro Gallery in Louisville, Debra Lott intends to give respite from the unending stream of stressful news and trauma-filled events we are witnessing in our lives and on our screens. To her show’s title, she has appended a quotation of the Austrian-born early 20^th-century existentialist philosopher Martin Buber: “The World is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable through the embracing of one of its beings.” While Lott had already named the exhibit when she encountered Buber’s words, they perfectly describe what she is about in this series of 9 luminous oil paintings. Lott’s response as an artist to the “anxiety and exhaustion” occasioned by even secondhand experience of the suffering, violence, and instability of our world is this enfolding gesture. She states, “I felt compelled to create an exhibition centered on comfort and compassion. Through figurative painting, I seek to offer a quiet refuge that invites reflection and connection.”

These canvases range from chiaroscuro to an almost overexposed bright wash, and Lott’s mastery of her medium shows in the beauty and grace of the forms she paints as well as their emotive pull. Debra renders the stillness and presence of her female subjects, inviting us to pause and breathe along with them. Whether as hands gently extended, figures cradling and leaning on each other, or in the form of an earthly goddess sitting with fox kits, the peace that Lott proposes is embodied and entwined. We may be solitary, but we are not alone in the world if we stay in touch with each other.

 “Cradled Prism,” “Kaleidoscope,” “Blended Spectrum” — these are the titles of a painter in love with light and optics. Debra has been painting with oils since her teens, when she began studying privately with EC Comics illustrator Graham Ingles, whom she calls her greatest influence and mentor. He persuaded her to switch from landscapes to portraits so that she could make a living as a painter, and she has spent her career painting the female figure. She loves color and the ways different human skin tones reflect light. She likes to involve white sheets as an abstract element in her compositions and another way to convey texture, color, and light.

 But something keeps our contemplation from being purely aesthetic, even with the hypnotic hum emanating from these paintings. Here are female subjects whose physical beauty maintains a certain tension with their interiority. To a person, they seem preoccupied, and Lott’s painting lets that be, doesn’t resolve it. Instead, she accommodates the weight of thoughts and circumstances and shows us the light that plays around and through the worry and sadness of the world. 

The painting entitled “Cherished,” with its photorealism and aura of the uncanny, might seem a bit of an outlier but it perfectly exemplifies this idea. Lott’s approach to her models is discreet, initiating a relationship that goes beyond the visual to allow a glimpse of a soul, and leaving them with their privacy intact. Returning to Martin Buber, I am reminded of his concept of the “I-Thou” relationship, where we meet as one subject to another, against modernity’s relentless push towards the “I-It” relationship, in which we experience the other as an object or a means to an end.