Artist Linda Colletta Art for Hailey & Justin Bieber
From Bieber, With Love
It seems fitting that Justin Bieber owns one of Linda Colletta’s abstract, brightly colored artworks. Colletta didn’t know about the pop star’s purchase until later; he’d found it via her Instagram feed and bought it using an alias. “It was so exciting to have a celebrity find me, really dig my work, and buy a piece for his wife,” she says. The clincher may have been the work’s title, “Yellow Tinted Glasses and a Pink Gelato,” a lyric from a song by Bieber’s pal, Cautious Clay.
Beyoncé & Britney Spears
In some ways, that sale shows how Colletta’s career has come full circle. Before becoming a fine artist, she spent 18 years as a TV set designer specializing in pop music for MTV and VH1, painting backdrops for the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Christina Aguilera, Dave Matthews, Paul McCartney, Coldplay, Ozzy Osbourne, Duran Duran, Britney Spears and countless others including Destiny’s Child. “I was in Beyonce’s trailer with her when she was freaking out before the Billboard Music Awards. I didn’t even know who I was with––they didn’t even know who they were yet, they were all so young.”
Artistic Instincts
Both of Colletta’s parents were artists, and despite being a painter all her life, she felt somehow overshadowed by her mother’s talent. “My mother did photo realism, and she was just so brilliant at it, and I remember at a very young age deciding that if I couldn’t be as good as her then I was no good.” Those self-confidence issues kept her from developing her own artistic sensibilities. A debilitating bout of Lyme disease in 2009 forced her to quit her job, and the only thing she could really do was paint. She began creating small watercolors, which led her to try abstraction for the first time as a sort of release from the strictures of her mother’s realism. “I thought why would I paint a tree when I could just go outside and look at a tree, what the universe made a million times better than I could ever paint it? What’s the point? I just thought that that’s what art had to be. You had to be able to see something.”
Playing With Abstraction
Colletta’s experimentation with abstraction was a breakthrough in developing her own artistry. “I could create something that doesn’t exist and that would be interesting, a worthwhile exploration, and that’s really what started me in my practice of abstraction.” In the summer of 2017 Colletta created a body of work that truly represented her sensibility in fluorescent, neon-bright colors, and staged her own pop-up show in Westport, Connecticut. She didn’t care if anything sold. She just wanted to express herself. “I painted whatever I wanted, and the show sold out completely, and I felt so validated.”
Activating the Canvas
“I’m purely painting for the love of painting and the process and the materiality of the paint and the canvas. I’m like a little mad scientist in my lab playing with paint and stuff.” Colletta is known for pushing paint water from cleaning her brushes while walking on her canvases in her Vans sneakers with a polka-dot texture on the soles, creating a speckle effect on the canvas. You don’t see that when the painting is complete, but it’s a way for her to “activate” the canvas as a start. “It’s fun. I put on music and I dance all around the canvas.” Incorporating acrylic, oil stick, spray paint, ink, graphite, and canvas scraps she includes holes and seams in her paintings that are asymmetrical and random; she keeps mistakes and accidents. She works on vintage upcycled painters’ drop cloths. “They’re worn out and dirty, and they have old paint on them, and I love that gritty, raw foundation. And then I build on top of that with this happy, poppy, candy-coated world, like a rainbow culture, everything’s with sprinkles on top, on some level.”
Hamptons Exhibitions
Colletta recently had a solo show of her largescale works at White Room Gallery and at the Market & Design fair in Bridgehampton. lindacolletta.com
