Paul Solevad is a Danish-American painter and illustrator based in Camas, Washington, whose work crackles with color, energy, and a restless commentary on modern life. Working primarily in oil on wood panel, Solevad layers image upon image, building up, covering over, and excavating back again, to create compositions that feel simultaneously urgent and playful. He describes his approach as "surreal expressionism" or "cartoon expressionism," a language indebted to the bold visual traditions of Philip Guston, Keith Haring, and Shepard Fairey, yet wholly his own.
Born and raised in California, Solevad earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from California Lutheran University in 1992, which included a six-month course of art studies in Glasgow, Scotland. That early immersion in international art culture left a lasting impression, broadening his visual vocabulary and deepening his commitment to the craft. After graduating, he worked across a wide range of commercial illustration and painting studios, contributing editorial illustrations to publications including Willamette Week, Denver Westword, and The Progressive, and executing large-scale mural commissions for clients including the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco and the Cayman Islands.
Over the years, Solevad has exhibited his paintings throughout California and the Pacific Northwest, with solo shows at Portland's Jupiter Gallery, Fife Restaurant, and Onda Gallery, as well as group exhibitions at SOMAR Gallery in San Francisco and a solo presentation at the Museum of Danish America in Iowa. Whether painting urban landscapes of Portland, sardonic portraits, or abstracted scenes of daily life, his canvases reward close looking, dense with wit, symbol, and a deep awareness of the speed and noise of contemporary culture.
Solevad's work asks us to slow down long enough to see ourselves in the fray. His piece Portal, included in Luckygirl's inaugural exhibition, carries that invitation forward, a threshold, a question, a passage into something just beyond the frame.
