Summer of Art featured artist: Kimberly Lavon

This summer, City Pulse will feature local art on our cover for up to eight issues: June 27-Aug. 29, excluding our Aug. 15 anniversary issue. Submission guidelines: Anyone living in Ingham, Eaton or Clinton counties may submit entries. Artists agree to give the originals to the Arts Council of Greater Lansing, which places them in the silent auction at its annual Holiday Glitter fundraiser. The artists receive 30 percent.

Submissions should be print quality (300 dpi).

The available space is 10.25 inches wide by 6.5 inches high. Your art need not be exactly that, but it needs to be a rectangle of roughly those proportions — or able to be cropped to those proportions — for us to make it work.

Submit an original piece of art to lansingarts.slideroom.com. For more information, please call the Arts Council at (517) 372-4636.

This week’s cover is by Kimberly Lavon. How did you create the piece on this week’s cover?

The name of the piece is “Fireworks in the City,” and it was inspired by a photograph that a client brought me to make my Capitol block print look more like the favorite photos that she had. The background was full of fireworks and I'd never seen the photo before. I thought it was really beautiful. So I used it as a reference for her art and then I used it as a reference for the art I made for the cover. It’s new for me, it’s a linocut print with digital illustration. I've been doing illustrating lately and I thought I would try it to see if it would work out, and it worked out pretty good in my opinion.

What kind of media do you work, what’s your style, what's your trademark?

Recently it's been described to me that my style looks like ‘90s pop art, which I'm not sure if I necessarily agree with. But, it does have kind of heavy lines and blocky shapes that would lend itself to ‘90s pop art. So I suppose that’s cool, with the bright colors and stuff. I like to use bright colors in my work and maybe that’s derivative of my Latin heritage, but I can't be 100 percent sure.

What keeps you inspired as an artist? It depends. Coffee, conversation, people, locations. Lately it's really beautiful poetry for some reason and how stories are told, who tells them and why.

Tell us about the projects you're working on and what’s been keeping you busy.

I'm doing a children's book and a book for myself, I'm doing my very first custom collage block for Jen Sygit’s new album release, a lot of graphic design, working with a local charcuterie guy who's got really amazing food and illustration and logo design for a life coach. Just a bunch of really cool diverse stuff.

How about for the rest of year? What's on the horizon for you?

Well, I have a huge thing that I'm dying to tell you about, but I can't just yet. I’m going to unveil it in two months, but it's my biggest project to date. In the meantime, I'm launching my new website, which will have print on demand services and bunch of other stuff.