Night Garden

Lostutter is associated with the Chicago Imagists, representational artists who worked in a surrealist vein beginning in the 1960s. Inspired by his travels abroad and by ancient mythology, he creates drawings and watercolors that merge humans, birds, and plants into fantastical hybrids. In a 2012 interview, Losutter said, "I firmly believe that people don't quite see. Religion wants you to wait until you get to heaven and then you'll be rewarded with paradise. I'm saying, 'Look around you, this is a paradise. ... It's a paradise here,' and then if you look at the birds and nature and the way things grow, it's all here now." In this drawing, what appears at first to be a mask in the form of a leaf is revealed upon closer examination to be an extension of the figure itself. This otherworldly subject is made all the more strange by the refined and precise style in which it is represented.