Lost in Focus

The artwork of Lana Grove

Story by Darin M. White from the winter 2019 edition of Lawrence Magazine

Some things just come naturally. This is how Lana Grove describes her love of art, something she remembers from her first days growing up on the West Coast. Here, drawing and painting were part of her daily life at home and beginning with the earliest grades at school. When the school curriculum changed to more structured lessons, Grove found her outlet in applying graffiti to desks (and then being forced to scrub the desks during recesses) and becoming her elementary school’s go-to artist for illustrating binders.

Graduating from high school, Grove had a number of college credits in art and was able to quickly transition into the California College of Arts in Oakland and San Francisco. She describes this school as exactly the “private art college filled with eccentric youth and quirky professors” that she had dreamed of, and happily finished it with her degree in interdisciplinary painting and drawing.

From that moment, Grove set off on a career in design and illustration—a vocation she continued as she relocated to Kansas, began a family and took on some part-time education jobs. Currently the full-time art program coordinator at the Willow Domestic Violence Center in Lawrence, Grove continues to create new works both for herself and clients in her spare time. This artwork includes graphic design portraits, maps, wooden panels, political logos, paintings, sculpture and more. (Her digital illustrations also frequently appear in this publication.)

Grove notes she intentionally chooses not to specialize in one genre. “[I] never tried to narrow the scope of what I do to just one avenue, and through experience have realized that my mind just can’t handle that one path kind of focus, so I continue to grow, learn, and try things as I move through life,” she says.

Some of her new experiences come from commissioned works, a genre that forces her to focus on each stage of the process to ensure it meets a client’s requests. That approach is entirely opposite of how she creates fine art, where she often becomes so absorbed in the process that she doesn’t remember making the piece once it is finished. But in either case, Grove says her measure of success is the same, creating a work that “inspires, repulses, or touches a person, through beauty, pain, or just good design. Everyone needs to see visual images that make them look twice, whatever the reason.”