Photo by Erin Nelson.
Liz Lane, owner of Liz Lane Gallery, stands in her new studio and gallery space in the Bluff Park Village Shopping Center. Lane relocated her business to Bluff Park from Homewood in July.
Liz Lane spent a lot of time with her mom in her art studio and the multiple art galleries she owned while growing up in Tuscaloosa.
Lane said she spent so much time around her mom that she didn’t realize her own passion about art until she got older.
“I didn’t really do a lot of art classes or anything like that. I just had constant exposure to art,” Lane said. “I’ve always just done art. I didn’t realize that it wasn’t normal to do the amount of art that I was doing. I watched my mom do it, and I just thought that’s what people did.”
Now, Lane features her mom’s art in her own gallery, Liz Lane Gallery, which she moved from Homewood to Bluff Park Village in Hoover in July. Lane also has a second location in Asheville, North Carolina.
She had been in Homewood for five years, and the plan was always to move her gallery somewhere closer to her home in Hoover. But her plan became more urgent when the ceiling started to cave in at their Homewood location, she said.
“I knew I needed to move, but it was pushed a little faster than I planned on it happening because our ceiling started to cave in,” Lane said. “There was a storm, and I guess the pipes that go into the sewer system weren’t draining right, and I guess they’d never been cleaned out in over 60 years. We walked in one morning, and there was a 4-by-6-foot hole in the ceiling.”
Lane graduated from The University of Alabama with a degree in fashion design and took a brief hiatus from painting after college. She started painting again when she worked at Four Seasons on 18th Street South in Homewood.
“They were nice enough to let me start putting out paintings that I’d done just for fun, and they started selling right away,” Lane said. “The more I sold, the more I kept doing it.”
Once she started painting again, she couldn’t stop. Lane said she sometimes stayed up until 2 a.m. to paint.
Lane mainly paints abstract and figure pieces with a “feminine voice,” something that she said can’t be described, only felt.
Her art reflects topics and issues that she’s passionate about, such as women’s empowerment and the environment, she said.
She wants her gallery to be a safe, creative space for women because female artists struggle to find representation, something she has experienced firsthand, she said.
“From talking to other female artists, I knew it was a problem,” Lane said. “It’s competitive no matter who you are when you’re going into art, especially for women, so I had an opportunity to have studio space and start a gallery at the same time. I don’t have a specific rule about only representing women, but I definitely decided early on that I was going to provide a space for that.”
She learned the importance of protecting the environment from her father, who taught chemical engineering at The University of Alabama, she said.
“Just because he’s a scientist and he’s worked a lot on alternative energies, I always grew up hearing about it from a very young age,” Lane said. “I feel like it’s always been a part of my vocabulary.”
She said though a lot of people are “disheartened'' about the effect climate change has had on the Earth recently, she’s very optimistic about the future because now “people believe it’s happening, for the most part.”
“With my gallery, my primary focus is creating beauty in the world, and I feel like you can’t have beauty in the world without protecting the rights of other people and the environment,” Lane said. “They can’t be separated.”
