Lily Stockman, 39, is an abstract painter whose work has the cerebral mysticism of the Tibetan thangka paintings that she discovered in Mongolia and also perhaps the simplicity of the Shaker embroidery samplers that her artist grandmother passed down—“someone’s ecstatic experience translated into something that’s given to someone.” Stockman, who is having a solo show in June at Almine Rech in London, is the house intellectual, bringing books and articles to the others’ attention. She describes the communal space as “the closest I’ve ever come to utopia.” Her mother worked with the Children’s Television Workshop, the group that developed Sesame Street, and her father was a classics major who later became a hay farmer in rural New Jersey. She’s the oldest of four girls, and she and her husband, an environmentalist, have three young children. Before her youngest, Freddy, was born last summer, Stockman rode her bike to work every morning along the L.A. River bike path. “L.A. was so eerily quiet at the beginning of COVID, and the river wildlife really exploded. I got to know this great blue heron.... It’s a very L.A. situation to have nature quietly taking over an urban landscape,” she says.
