Hood Life

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Painted in 2017, Hood Life is characteristic of the city scenes that Lovelace painted from the late 1990s until the end of his life. The painting presents a view straight down a single street in a densely packed downtown area, which feels particularly tight thanks to Lovelace’s manipulation of linear perspective. The street seems tipped upward toward the surface of the canvas, and once it crosses an intersection and appears to head up a hill its incline looks even steeper. On either side, the diagonal lines of the sidewalks and storefronts converge at sharp angles toward the center of the picture. The two rows of businesses form opposing walls, and at the back of the scene the hill and ranks of taller buildings provide an almost flat back wall, resulting in a space that feels firmly compressed, even constrained. This view feels almost oppressive and inescapable, and that spatial quality itself suggests some of Lovelace’s perspective—in other images he depicts strict demarcations between geographic areas, up to and including high, impassable walls, suggesting how a neighborhood or one side of town might feel like a prison. However, in Hood Life an overall feeling of energy and activity diminishes this sense of confinement. Pedestrians fill the scene as they amble down the road, interact with one another, head in and out of buildings, jaywalk in front of cars, and generally mill about. Their clothing is colorful, and it generally seems as if they are out to see and be seen, aligning them with viewers who likewise gain an opportunity to observe and participate in city life through Lovelace’s painting. The many businesses likewise provide a range of vitality and variety with colorful signs presenting a bar, a restaurant, a beauty shop, a church, and more. In other works, Lovelace sometimes presents stark contrasts between shopfronts associated with spirituality on the one hand and sin on the other, and while a similar mixture is evident in Hood Life, it is not so schematic. Instead, the painting and its title might suggest that life in an urban “Hood” populated predominantly (though not exclusively) by Black people is not so different than life in general—it includes everything from serious to frivolous, opportunistic to nurturing, earthly to holy.