The first-place art winner in our 2025 contest is Lavinia Hale, a painter from Greencastle, Indiana whose submissions were universally appreciated by our guest judges this year. As we continue to search for a new Art Editor, I had the privilege of interviewing Lavinia! I loved our conversation through email, which resulted in this interview. It was wonderful to learn more about her process and progression as an artist and a woman. Enjoy!
Segullah: Tell us about your early experiences with art, and how growing up in a “creative, can-do family” shaped your current, artistic way of life.
Lavinia: My earliest experience with art happened when I was around 5. I was visiting my best friend who lived just down the street. As we entered her backyard, I saw her mom with an easel plein air painting some flowers. I was mesmerized. I vowed then and there that I was going to do that someday.
My family culture was one of using your hands and creating, not consuming. My mom’s creative talent is home design and decorating. She has the vision and my dad builds. As kids, when we weren’t needed to help with a project, we were lovingly booted out the door to explore nature. We moved a ton going up (20 times by the time I was 20), but we always managed to live in fascinating places with lots of beautiful scenery. These experiences congealed into a do-it-yourself attitude and love of nature and painting, especially plein air was a perfect fit.
Segullah: Do you remember how old you were when you painted your first plein air piece? Was there magic in the experience?
Lavinia: I remember plein air painting as a 10-year-old when we lived in Pennsylvania. I took my watercolors and my sketchbook outside and did some paintings of the woods and my house. I had no idea what plein air was, I just wanted to paint from life. It was magical even then—when you slow down to paint something, to really look at it, your whole vision becomes more attuned to the nuances of color, shape and value.
Segullah: You attended Brigham Young University—what do you value most about your formal education in the Visual Arts program there?
Lavinia: I loved my time at BYU Provo. I declared a Visual Arts Major and was accepted into the program as an incoming Freshman. I lived a pretty typical freshman life full of classes (18 credits per semester), dating, and generally figuring myself out.
The summer after my freshman year, I stayed on to take more classes and met the most wonderful returned missionary. We were married before the semester started up in the Fall. Three months later I was pregnant with our first child. Needless to say, that made a huge impact on the classes I could take. I had only taken one introductory oil painting class, but due to the lack of ventilation and exposure to certain pigments, I was limited in the types of classes I could take. Drawing, art history, and theory classes became the focus. After she was born in August, I took her along with me to class. My husband was a physics major and worked part time to support us. She was a fantastic baby.
I graduated when she was 8 months old (finishing my degree in 3 years). I had exactly the minimum number of credits to graduate. My “formal” education in the arts was extremely atypical, and curtailed, but that’s the beauty of the seasons of life. There are so many resources available now to learn all the techniques and formal things I missed, and I get to enjoy my family in the process.
Segullah: Your CV lists several years of involvement with your local arts council in Greencastle—what was the experience of being involved in the arts leadership in your community like? Do you feel as though your faith and values were an asset or a challenge—or both—in a predominantly non-LDS area?
Lavinia: My involvement with the arts council was extremely formative. It was the first time that I had reached out to do a formal service in the community. When the arts council being first organized, I attended a community meeting, and I was so nervous and stumbled over my words when I spoke. A few years later after it had become an official nonprofit, I found out where they were meeting and just showed up and said I wanted to help. I had no idea how a nonprofit board worked. I didn’t know you needed to be voted onto the board. I was just passionate and willing. They were wonderful and put me to work.
I served as Secretary, then Vice President, then President. I loved serving shoulder to shoulder with community minded individuals from different faiths and life experiences. I gained confidence in my skills as a leader and contributor. I was able to occasionally share my beliefs, the word of wisdom was always a great segway explaining why I didn’t drink coffee, tea or wine. With the organization being so new, I was part of developing what the arts council stood for, what programs we would support and what events we would launch.
Being in a small town community full of individuals from a variety of predominantly Christian faiths was an opportunity to break down barriers of misunderstanding, but more often ignorance, as well as learn from the goodness of so many people.
Segullah: What an excellent opportunity to let your light shine and engage in the give-and-take of building a community and relationships outside of our sometimes insulated church experiences!
Segullah: How did your artistic process change through your child-rearing years? What adaptations did you make to continue to work as your children grew, or did you pause for extended periods as you mothered?
Lavinia: I always tried to keep an art spark alive through all the child-rearing years, which lasted quite a while as we had 8 children over the span of 13 years. At Wymount married student housing, we partitioned off the last 4 feet of bedroom with a temporary freestanding wall to create a little studio for me on one side, and a wood lathe and small tools for my husband on the other. This set the tone for our priorities!
During grad school at Purdue University for my husband in Indiana, I had a studio in our teeny tiny master bathroom in our 900 sq foot home that was bursting with 6 kids by the time he finished. I only completed one or two paintings a year, usually wedding gifts for family, but I had a space and many times that was enough.
Segullah: That is fabulous—I really applaud you and your husband for seeing each other’s creative needs and making actual physical space for them during challenging times.
Segullah: How did your artistic nature manifest in terms of parenting? Have any of your children followed in your creative footsteps?
Lavinia: Being an artist is both a blessing and a curse in parenting. I craved intellectual and creative stimulation which is often hard to come by surrounded by littles. However, my husband and I always treated our home like a studio—full of tools and materials for creativity and usually less than picture perfect. The kids were all using scissors and hot glue guns at young ages. All the children are creative, but each manifests it differently. My oldest is pursuing fine art, but others are more interested in illustration and design while others are passionate about engineering. My husband is a physicist/engineer which is a different side of creativity. All of them are hands-on and problem solvers at their core.
Segullah: I agree—blessing and a curse! How wonderful it is to give children space and tools to explore their own creativity: picture-perfect can be overrated.
Segullah: Your website lists your motto as “embrace the process.” Tell us more about how you came to choose this phrase, and how you translate it into your daily, artistic life.
Lavinia: During the wonderful, long, messy, and often monotonous phase of life that is bearing and mothering young children, I had to be very careful to not just wish I was done with that phase and in another. I tried to look for and embrace the joys that came with where I was in my journey. It wasn’t easy. When new opportunities came as the children became more independent, I tried to appreciate them and not wish there were more. I had to be patient with myself and know that achieving my dreams would take time and a lot of practice.
Segullah: How much of your art is painted—or at least begun—out of doors as “en plein air” work. Do you ever take photographs to help you complete pieces in the studio? What do you feel changes the experience—in you and/or in your work—when you are painting in natural surroundings?
Lavinia: My process has evolved as my available time to spend painting has evolved. Before the children were all in school, it was nearly exclusively plein air, as I found it easier to paint when I could step away. Additionally, painting from life allows you to see the fuller, richer nuances of color and value. You can really get the feeling of the location. I love how I can see my past paintings and remember what it felt like to be there. Now that the kids are all in school, I am learning the benefits of taking a sketch from life and fully developing it in the studio. I use both the sketches and photo references.
Segullah: In your artist’s statement, you talk about painting being “an exercise of reducing complexity into fundamental, meaningful passages and marveling at God’s creations.” I’d love to hear you expand on this idea.
Lavinia: Nature has so much complexity and an overload of visual information. It is hard to not get lost in the weeds. I take time to step back, squint, and pay attention to what gets filtered out. The shapes that are left are the most important are the backbone of the painting. Life is like that! We can get so caught up in the minutiae of daily living that we miss the big picture—the relationships with God, family, and friends that really matter.
Segullah: So many of your paintings have such a sense of reverence and peace about them; what do you feel brings that sacredness to your work?
Lavinia: I think it’s a reflection of the peace and reverence I feel when I am viewing nature. It also comes from a desire to suggest rather than dictate. When painting I am juggling the desire to represent the scene, but also let the spontaneity of the process shine through. Using large brushes, palette knives, and sometimes impulsive strokes keeps things loose and playful.
Segullah: That’s wonderful. It’s so important for people to understand that art is a window into their own interpretation and that space and looseness is not a failing of the artist, but a generous gift to the viewer.
Segullah: Are there ways in which art has helped you to cope with or overcome challenges in less artistic areas of your life?
Lavinia: Being an artist is also a way of thinking. It’s being a problem solver and an out-of-the-box thinker. It’s someone who is comfortable with ambiguity, someone who thinks of the big picture and isn’t just waiting to be told what to do. They are creators, not just consumers. I use those skills all the time in every aspect of my life.
Segullah: Share with us a final bit of wisdom!
Lavinia: I just want to add that as women and mothers, especially in our church, we are often asked to make great sacrifices. The world we live in screams at us that we should be living life prioritizing self-actualization. Yes, it was incredibly hard to put my dreams on hold, yet God has so many times magnified my artistic efforts when He knew that I was sacrificing for others. Now that I am beginning to reap the reward of seeing my children grow, progress and become such amazing people AND see my own dreams and opportunities blossom, it’s the best of both worlds.
