Intrinsic Paradox: In Conversation with Sol Summers
Sol Summers makes evocative paintings of cacti, cartoons, and well-known figures. Summers speaks with Lara Xenia about his artistic inspiration, material experimentation, and love for the outdoors.
Figure 1: Sol Summers, Daybreak, 2024, oil on canvas, 36 × 60 inches (91 × 152 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist © Sol Summers
Lara Xenia: I noticed you have a chess board in your studio. How often do you play?
Sol Summers: Yeah, I’ve definitely gone through obsessive phases with chess. There’s something incredibly satisfying about it. Making art is open-ended, ambiguous, never really done. But with chess, there’s a clear outcome. Win or lose, it’s definitive. I think that contrast is part of why so many artists, like Duchamp, were drawn to it. It scratches a very different itch than painting. You can spend forever trying to finish a piece, but a chess game always ends.
LX: Yes, Duchamp retired from being an artist to become a competitive chess player. How long do you take to grapple with each composition?
SS: I'm a slow painter. I would say things take a lot of time to marinate, and change. I like to let a painting evolve and have a life of its own.
LX: Did you do art when you were growing up? What drew you to paint in particular?
SS: Yeah, I was definitely a creative kid. I never really took to music like my brothers did, but I was into writing poetry and drawing. They were these private little outlets. I was kind of a quiet, introspective kid. I loved biology, especially writers like Stephen Jay Gould and Oliver Sacks. Just really into the inner workings of things. I feel like the youngest is always the creative, brooding one in the sibling hierarchy. I don't know if you felt that too [laughs].
LX: Oh, definitely.
SS: Right? And I feel like in a young person’s mind, there’s this unspoken hierarchy of art materials. You graduate from pencil to colored pencil, then maybe acrylic, and eventually you work up the courage to oil paint. When I was a freshman in high school, oil painting felt like this huge leap. It was expensive, intimidating. I remember feeling guilty about spending the couple hundred bucks it took to get all the supplies. I still think about that sometimes when I’m being a little too precious with a tube of paint [laughs].
LX: I totally get that. Are you a Gamsol guy, or do you have a go-to brand?
Figure 2: Sol Summers, Untitled (Huntington Gardens Cactus), 2024, oil on canvas, 221 × 160 inches (152 × 122 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist © Sol Summers
SS: I think every painter has loyalty to a brand of paint. I used to be a really big Old Holland guy, and lately I've been really digging Williamsburg, but you’ll get to different levels of nerdom. I’m a total material nut. When they were banning the Lead White in the U.K., Lucian Freud purportedly stocked up on 5,000 tubes of it. There's some tubes of paint where I think, “Ugh, I should have done that,” like Williamsburg had this one Slate Grade that they discontinued. I was using the last tube of it as if it was liquid gold, putting the tiniest dab on my palette [laughter]. I loved that color.
LX: What’s your process like?
SS: It’s pretty varied. I’ve always been kind of a frustrated painter. For years I didn’t feel all that satisfied with what I was making. I think back then I used painting more as a form of escape. Now it feels more like a way of actually expressing something, so when I look at older work, it’s almost like it came from a different person. The whole energy was different. I used to hit huge creative blocks, and that would just build up until everything kind of exploded. But since I started looking more to nature for inspiration a lot of those creative blocks just evaporated. The paintings have been flowing more easily, and I think that has a lot to do with just feeling more connected to the source of the work.
Figure 3: Sol Summers, Cacti, 2024, oil on canvas, 60 × 48 inches (152 × 122 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist © Sol Summers
LX: I love that. A lot of artists, like De Kooning or Manet, would famously scrap or rework their canvases. Do you abandon any of your work?
SS: I'm a big time abandoner. I'm a quitter [laughs]. I heard a painter on a podcast say he finishes like 99 out of 100 paintings. That seems insane to me. I think as creative people our desire is to make “newness”, new things, and as long as you're making new things and really pushing that edge, a lot of things are going to fall apart. I think I finish about a quarter of what I start.
Sometimes paintings just pile up and I’ll toss them all at once. Especially during periods where I’ve felt a little lost, like when I was making those frog paintings. I started thinking about how much energy gets poured into these pieces that don’t quite work, but still feel charged in some way. And I wondered what if I could recycle that into something new? That impulse actually led to a TikTok I made back then. It’s kind of a time capsule of that whole strange chapter.
Figure 4: Sol Summers, Various stills from “Ribbit” TikTok process video, 2023. Assessed June 18, 2025. https://www.tiktok.com/@solsummers/video/7174704914822614315
LX: This blender video is wild! You’re literally recycling the material. That’s such an ethical thing to do [laughter].
SS: Yeah, I should not have been breathing that in. I had to throw the blender away after that. I had this moment of, “Wait, is this still food safe?” Probably not [laughs].
It’s funny, it’s been a long time since I even thought about those paintings. I can feel myself just kind of cringe, in this moment. There’s something kind of awkward about how new social media still feels. But at the same time, I really resonate with artists who try to make their work accessible. I get how alienating the art world can be. Sometimes you walk into a museum and just feel lost. Social media, for all its downsides, is an incredible bridge. It opens up a space for people who are curious but maybe never felt like they belonged in that world.
LX: It’s definitely an interesting terrain. And you also never know what twelve pieces in your studio are going to become your opus magnum.
SS: Absolutely, it’s funny how you never really know which paintings are going to stick, or which ones will end up meaning the most, even to you. My process has always been a bit all over the place. I don’t respond well to pressure, and a lot of my early work came from pushing back against that, just making what I wanted, almost as a form of personal rebellion. Looking back now, I think sometimes you make the painting, and sometimes the painting makes you. You learn from it, not just in the act of making, but in what happens after: showing it, hearing how people respond.
LX: That’s really true. I'm curious about what prompted you to start making polymorphic cacti and landscape compositions?
Figure 5: Sol Summers, Awakening, 2024, oil on canvas, 60 × 48 inches (152 × 122 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist © Sol Summers
Sometimes you make the painting, and sometimes the painting makes you.
SS: I was wandering through the Desert Botanical section at the Huntington Gardens in L.A. and noticed how the cactus had something very alien about it. It looked really challenging to paint succulents on a large-scale, so that was the impetus. As an artist, you're always looking around and you never stop working. I was in Sedona this weekend, and everything made me pause and think, “Ah, is that a composition?” [Laughs] I generally have a bunch of photos floating around on my computer and every once in a while I'll spring on one and decide, “Let me try to see if this works.”
LX: Do you go camping a lot out in the abyss, or do you mainly visit different botanical gardens to commune with nature?
SS: Yes, the wonderful thing about my life these last couple years has been, my job essentially is to go get inspired by nature and then make paintings, which - could you dream up a better job? It's insane. I've been spending a lot of time backpacking, camping, and just communing with nature. All my creative blocks have really dissolved and it's really opened my eyes to nature as the wellspring of creativity. When I’m out there, I have to be out there for sunrise and sunset, so I'll often nap in the middle of the day,
LX: That’s dedication. I bet it’s also nice to hike in L.A. for that.
SS: Yes, I hike a lot. I was actually out hiking when the fires started here with my buddy. A lot of trails are closed down now, but you can drive for an hour and find some hiking, which I've been doing.
LX: Wow, I can’t begin to imagine what that felt like.
Figure 6: Agnes Pelton, Departure, 1952, oil on canvas, 24 × 18 inches (60.96 × 45.72 cm). Collection of Mike Stoller and Corky Hale Stoller. Photo: courtesy Paul Salveson © Paul Salveson
Figure 7: Works in progress, 2025, oil on canvas, varying dimensions. Photo: courtesy the artist © Sol Summers
SS: Yes, it was pretty crazy. But I've been trying to see different terrain. For the last couple months, I spent a lot of time around Mount San Jacinto because I was looking at Agnes Pelton’s work and felt really inspired by the history of the region, since Pelton spent a lot of time near Palm Springs. I went up to The Summit a month ago; it felt like a very spiritually-imbued place. I’ve also been really obsessed with Pelton’s teacher, Arthur Wesley Dow, particularly his painting The Temple of Shiva. I visited Sedona in search of inspiration in that vein and plan to go back there and to the Monument Valley area.
Figure 8: Arthur Wesley Dow, The Glory of Shiva, Shiva Temple, Grand Canyon, 1912, oil on canvas, 24 × 18 inches (60.96 × 45.72 cm). Photo: courtesy Shannon’s Fine Art Auctioneers
LX: This painting is lovely and so transcendental.
Figure 9: Pavel Tchelitchew, Phenomenon, 1930, oil on canvas, 17.25 × 11.5 inches (44 × 29 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist © Pavel Tchelitchew
SS: Yeah, I’ve also been looking at Pavel Tchelitchew. To me, his work looks very psychedelic. His painting The Phenomenon is just unbelievable [shows painting], and the little details are completely insane. It’s almost like a mix of Otto Dix and Hieronymus Bosch; there's so much to see in it. And it’s weirdly ahead of its time. I’m always drawn to painters who feel out of step with their era. Odilon Redon’s another one, his work always felt like it belonged to some other world. I've also been looking at Ernst Steiner, Augustin Lesage, Max Ernst. At any given time, I have a rotating carousel of five painters who are infusing my brain.
LX: Do you use airbrushes or spray paint?
SS: Yeah, I actually use airbrush a lot—with oil paint, which is probably why my life expectancy is hovering around 35 [laughs]. But honestly, I think the tools we use end up shaping so much of what we make. I was just thinking about how even something as simple as the invention of masking tape probably changed the entire trajectory of painting. I know that I use it constantly. It’s like van Eyck and oil painting. What do the last 600 years of art history look like without oil paint? Who knows.
But anyway, back to your actual question [laughs]—I see the airbrush as this weird analog version of a digital tool. It has that clean, almost Photoshop-y brush quality, which makes it feel really contemporary in a way I like.
Figure 10: Sol Summers, Illumination, 2025, oil on canvas, 86 × 63 inches (218 × 160 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist © Sol Summers
LX: That’s neat. I like how you render the rest of the composition with acute detail, but leave the top register open. It almost grants the tableau breathing room, almost like it becomes a literal sky you can breathe in.
SS: Yes, I think Matisse said something like, “A painting should be like a comfortable armchair.” It should relax you, offer a space where the eyes can rest. In my newer work, I’m trying to build in that kind of space while also hiding strange things in plain sight. If you look closely at the mountain ranges in some pieces, they shift from pure cadmium red into dioxazine purple. The longer you look, the more the palette starts to unravel. It begins to feel almost illogical, like the colors don’t quite add up.
Figure 11: Summers painting en plein air, 2025. Photo: courtesy the artist
That tension really interests me…painting nature with synthetic, right-out-of-the-tube color. Most landscape painting relies on earth tones—ochres, umbers, siennas, which makes sense: you’re depicting nature with pigments that literally come from the earth. But it also creates a kind of sameness. When you use saturated, artificial color instead, it creates this dissonance that, weirdly, feels closer to how nature actually looks. I think we filter a lot of it out. But there are moments, particularly during sunrise and sunset, where the world feels almost unreal in its intensity.
And all of that loops back to the tools. I honestly don’t know how someone like Arthur Wesley Dow managed it, mixing colors in real time, outdoors, with the light changing minute by minute. When I was in Sedona, I remember thinking, you’ve got five minutes to lock in your entire palette before the moment’s gone. It made me appreciate how lucky we are to be able to bring those moments back into the studio, slow them down, and spend real time with them.
LX: So you use photographs as aides-mémoires then, or is it all imagined?
Figure 12: Studio view of the Cacti series, 2025. Photo: courtesy the artist © Sol Summers
SS: Some of the foreground is collaged from a couple different photographs and the very front is just imagined. Most of these recent paintings are from a couple trips to Tucson and Scottsdale that I took last year, so I’ve been working from an image backlog.
Figure 13: Aide-mémoire from Joshua Tree, 2024. Photo: courtesy the artist
LX: This might be a metaphysical question, but if you had to exist somewhere, would you rather be in the depths of the ocean or outer space?
Figure 14: Sol Summers, Untitled, 2025, oil on canvas, 36 × 24 inches (91 × 61 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist © Sol Summers
SS: I actually think about this quite a bit. When you're out in these more arid terrains like the desert, sometimes I’ll think to myself that it looks just like Mars, but with a little bit of vegetation. I don't think anything we're going to find in space is going to be as interesting as what's on Earth, so I would have to go with the deep ocean. I’m more curious as to what's down there. I think space is probably really boring.
LX: As a final question, who was this portrait of?
Art doesn’t move the world by force. It moves it by evolving the soul. It’s not decoration, it’s a technology of consciousness.
Figure 15: Sol Summers, Portrait of Matisse, 2018, oil on canvas, 91 × 63 inches (231 × 160 cm). Photo: courtesy the artist © Sol Summers
SS: This painting shows Matisse in his final years, making his paper cutouts. He’s old, wheelchair-bound, and yet he’s making these playful, almost childlike forms. That image just stuck with me. When I was younger, I used to feel this inner conflict about being an artist, like what’s the point of making paintings while the world burns? It felt selfish, absurd. I’d wonder: if everything collapsed tomorrow, what would any of this mean? Wouldn’t my time be better spent doing something “useful”?
I think now I see it differently. There’s this Picasso line: “The chief enemy of creativity is common sense.” And he’s right. Art doesn’t operate on logic. Picasso would have felt powerless against Franco when he painted Guernica, but that work became one of the most enduring anti-war statements in history. Not because it solved anything, but because it stirred something deeper.
Art doesn’t move the world by force. It moves it by evolving the soul. It’s not decoration, it’s a technology of consciousness. In that sense, it might actually be the most serious job there is. It’s how we process the unexplainable. It helps us make sense of what's happening and prepares us for what comes after, in life or death. So that’s what I see in that image. It’s not just a man foolishly passing time. It’s someone doing exactly what he’s meant to be doing: using what little time he has left to bring a bit more beauty into the world. And that’s not a contradiction. That’s the whole point.
Sol Summers
Sol Summers (b. 1998, Portland, Oregon) is known for his kaleidoscopic cacti and figurative works, as well as his deep affinity for sunsets and sunrises. Summers lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design for one year before pursuing a full-time practice. His 2024 series Parhelion was featured in the Untitled Art Fair in Art Basel Miami, presented by Carl Kostyál Gallery.