Before I met Lyda, I met her art. I was shopping for records with a mutual friend, who showed me Lyda's website as we were digging through bins of dance music. "I need one of those paintings!," I told my friend, and I meant it. A couple days later, I was in Lyda's apartment picking out the one that now hangs in my dining room. The painting is enormous and awash in various shades of lavender and silver. It reminds me of the "violet hour" in the winter, that time in the late afternoon when the sky and snow turn a deep shade of mauve. The violet hour sometimes happens in cities, but to truly experience it you need to be in the woods, in a house with giant windows where the purple can slide in as you watch the sun slide away. 

Lyda and I have since become close friends, and even though I've been in her apartment a million times, I always find something new in her art that I love. A couple things about her work immediately jump out, and you can get a sense for them from the photos below. She's a master of color and movement. Her palettes have an incredible ability to draw on a range of emotions so that her paintings instantly create certain moods. You can also feel movement in her paintings, and unsurprisingly she has a number of them that are inspired by the sea. 

Perhaps it's her background in video games and design that enabled Lyda to create such vivid pieces of art. But there are so many other influences in her art, too, and what better way to explore them than with the artist herself.