Actress Lisa Edelstein Of ‘House’ On How She Transformed Into A Visual Artist
… Throughout my career as an actress, I’ve always tried to do work that helps to eliminate shame. Playing someone who’s gay, or trans, or who’s a sex worker, or a weirdo or even just a gal going through menopause (the horror!), it’s been important to me that these characters present with a dignity and humanity that belies the societal standing they might otherwise have. The same thing goes for the stories that I paint. We use photography so much as a means to control our memory of things, to brighten it up a bit, and in doing so we lose the things that really make us who we are. Some of that might be hard to look at, but it’s honesty is a relief. We don’t need to see the instagram version of our past, there are no answers waiting for us there.
As a part of our series about “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Became An Artist” I had the pleasure of interviewing Lisa Edelstein.
Lisa started her career by writing, composing, and performing her AIDS awareness musical “Positive Me” at the renowned La Mama theater in New York City. Since then, she has played a variety of culturally ground-breaking roles including lesbian Rhonda Roth on ABC’s Relativity, where they had the first ever lesbian make-out scene on Network TV and sex worker Laurie on West Wing, who smoked pot on camera and chose prostitution as the way to pay for her law degree. She then spent seven seasons as Cuddy on the world-wide hit Fox medical drama “House,” followed by five seasons as Abby, the star of “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce,” and three seasons as Phoebe, Alan Arkin’s drug addict daughter on “The Kominsky Method.” During this time, she started directing — both on TV and her own projects (short films Unzipping, Lulu) as well as writing, selling both a pilot and a feature she is attached to direct. Next on the acting horizon is Fremantle’s limited series “Little Bird” as well as the short film projects “Swipe NYC” and “Shadow Brother” with Alden Ehrenreich. Entirely self-taught, Lisa developed an art practice during the pandemic. Edelstein’s exhibition at SFA Advisory in New York marks her first-ever solo presentation of her work.
Thank you so much for doing this with us Lisa! Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?
I grew up in Wayne, NJ, about a half hour outside of NYC, but millions of miles away in its conservative way of viewing the world. I credit it for giving me all the fuel I needed to get out of town as soon as I old enough.
Can you share a story with us about what brought you to this specific career path?
My husband is a remarkably talented man and a brilliant painter. I love watching what he does and have learned an enormous amount from him. And in a very quiet way, he has surreptitiously supported my own object-making. We have a hallway loaded with art, it’s the one place in the house with good walls to hang and at times it’s been stuffed from floor to ceiling with amazing pieces. Scattered amongst them were my own drawings, some from twenty years ago, some more recent, because Robert loved them and gave them as much value as the extremely prized pieces we have from our renowned artist friends. So it was during Covid lockdown, having watched every disaster, apocalyptic, or zombie movie ever made, all while doing countless jigsaw puzzles, I decided I needed to be more creative. I used to love drawing and coloring as a child and even into my twenties, especially with markers. So I bought myself some adult coloring books and some amazing markers and went to town. But I hated the images in the coloring books and grew to resent coloring in other people’s drawings, because then what? So I decided I needed to make my own. Using old family photos as a resource, I began. The pictures got larger and larger and somewhat obsessively detailed until I couldn’t get through a piece without running out of ink several times. So I bought refillable markers. Still, I was so frustrated by how they worked that instead of refilling the markers I just started painting with the refill ink. Finally, I switched to watercolor. I’d never used it before so a friend of my mom’s gave me a mini class for about 1/2 an hour to show me how watercolor functions and then I just went to town.
Can you tell us the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Painting’s been a really wonderful addition to my life. It’s the one way I’ve found that I can be creative on my own terms. Between jobs, even on jobs, I can have this remarkable experience that relies on no one else, no one’s invitation or permission, not even anyone’s direction. Sometimes in my studio I find myself switching between rehearsing a scene, writing a script and painting, just hopping from one part of the small room to the next, like a one-woman band. Each form of expression feeds the next. It’s really exciting!
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?
“Family,” which opens this week, is the result of these last two years’ effort and what an amazing feeling it is to have my work shared like that. Making things has always been an outlet of mine, just a private one. So there is something particularly scary about the possibility of rejection in this form of expression. Rejection is a massive part of the experience of being any kind of artist. In fact, it’s really what we experience most often, certainly us actresses! And maybe I needed to feel like I had a solid base of success under my feet before I dared put myself out there in this way. The work itself is like an extension of what I’ve always been doing — story-telling. I look for unintended moments, telling unintended truths. There’s something about imagery like that from old photos that doesn’t exist in our world anymore. We are all too camera savvy, we know these images are forever, therefore they are filtered, cleaned up, and modified for future reference. As I dug through the piles of pictures of my family, I especially sought out those images that reflected the feeling of my memory, rather than the feeling the photographer hoped for me to remember. Because of that, even though these pictures come from my personal collection, people seem to recognize their own family dynamics when they look at them, for better or worse! And I love that.
Where do you draw inspiration from? Can you share a story about that?
I’m interested in the way we collect memories. Right now it’s so controlled, it’s social media and iPhoto and we filter or throw pictures away that don’t tell the story we are interested in remembering. I love finding images that aren’t just a time capsule, but a feeling capsule. In that way, painting becomes an extension of the story-telling work that I’ve been doing one way or another my whole life.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
Throughout my career as an actress, I’ve always tried to do work that helps to eliminate shame. Playing someone who’s gay, or trans, or who’s a sex worker, or a weirdo or even just a gal going through menopause (the horror!), it’s been important to me that these characters present with a dignity and humanity that belies the societal standing they might otherwise have. The same thing goes for the stories that I paint. We use photography so much as a means to control our memory of things, to brighten it up a bit, and in doing so we lose the things that really make us who we are. Some of that might be hard to look at, but it’s honesty is a relief. We don’t need to see the instagram version of our past, there are no answers waiting for us there.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
