There is something so magical about dreaming up the world around you, and creating something out of nothing. It is so sweet to stand back, look at what you've just created, and say, "I made that. Now it is part of the world."
Harold and his awesome purple crayon were my heroes when I was a kid. I spent lots of time writing & illustrating stories and sculpting little houses & animals. I also spent tons of time creating moving shapes in space.
Today, I still spend most of my time making things. To bring home the bacon mmm... bacon, I work as a Front End Developer. On the side, I've published music reviews and taught college drawing. When I'm not thinking about bacon, I'm curled up, mini Moleskine and black Sakura Micron 005 in hand, drawing & writing. I post the majority of this work on my blog.
I live in Chicago with a Squirrel Monkey named Dan and a little Havanese pup named Mr. Deuce.
*I also answer to Lotus Girl, El Gee, Boot and Soups.
It’s the delicious stuff that partners form & function, and gives us beautifully fluid, human-friendly web experiences.
I'm a Front End Developer at skinnyCorp, the super awesome tech company behind threadless & more. I absolutely love working in the interwebs industry.
A clean, user-friendly site for Physio Pro, a physical therapy practice in Denver. Provided brand refresh, design, UI and front-end development.
Launched to help support the Njombe Stoves Project! Provided design, UI and front-end development.
A no-nonsense site designed for Chicago-based visual display and multimedia artist, Erika Friesth. Provided design, UI and front-end development.
lotus-girl.com was born in San Francisco alongside my alter ego, Lotus Girl, in 2002. This site is built with handmade drawings, semantic XHTML, CSS, jQuery, JavaScript & a wee bit of Ajax.
A resource library for Blue Cross Blue Shield Association Marketing. Sliced comp, created icons, built site with CSS, (X)HTML and custom user macros.
An applications portal for Blue Cross Blue Shield's health intelligence resource, BHI. Designed custom login, created CSS themes, maintained brand look & feel.
A series of interactive tools for more than twenty large hospital networks nationwide. Illustrated using Photoshop, sliced and diced, built with CSS, (X)HTML, JavaScript and animated with Flash.
i painted you a bird
and you drew a cage around it
with a blue Bic pen
i painted a door on the cage
and you gave the door a lock
i painted that lock a key
and you swallowed it
so i gave the bird a tiny painting of the sky
and you took the painting to the framers.
so i brought the bird a cloud
to remind her of the sky
and you told the cloud
to rain and rain and rain
so i gave the bird an umbrella
and you tore a hole in the fabric
and smiled sweetly.
so i sewed a tiny patch onto the hole
and smiled sweetly.
"i love you, " you said.
"i love you, too," i said, and sighed.
I created most of these paintings and drawings when I was a student. I don’t use color much anymore, so it’s fun to look back at this earlier work. These days, most of my artwork ends up on my blog.
Built upon personal iconography, my artwork invites a peek behind the veil of the sacred and the secret.
Figurative drawings and paintings, via confessional whispers and come-hithers, offer splices of psychological interiors; Lotus Girl, a child heroine who is part alter-ego and part entity all her own, floats through a world in which she is both the abuser and the abused, engaging in intimate yet irreverent dialogue with herself, the viewer, and her assailant; and ink drawings on linen, simultaneously delicate and disquieting, traverse the abyss between violence and tenderness.
An illustrated novella in-progress, Yesterday in Lotus Shoes borrows from the visual and textual vocabulary of previous work, while operating within the framework of a narrative to create its own unique language, its own idiosyncratic world.
Regardless of style and medium, my work is an investigation of loss and recovery. Mapping a nomadic movement from pain to solace, waking life to nightmare, and actual experience to memory, I celebrate the absurdity and fragility of life.
I was supposed to be busy painting serious painterly paintings, but one day Lotus Girl began appearing in my sketchbooks. She was a stubborn little thing, and despite my objections, she persisted and persisted. Now, seven years and many incarnations later, I'm still drawing her.
Today's Lotus Girl is a little more grown up, but vintage Lotus Girl still lives on here.
If you want to have a little piece o' Lotus Girl to call your very own,
hop over here (just a warning, it's starving for maintenance!)
You can't find me on twitter cuz I'm scared it will eat the little birdhouse I succumbed.
in my soul. I say this now, but chances are I'll succumb one of these days...
a la facebook.
If you are a kind & generous soul who likes to spread health & happiness around the world,
you will send me bountiful gifts of bacon and soup.
lotus-girl.com by Betsy Lam is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
