Lola Schnabel’s Violet Temper

“I wasn’t as interested in capturing the likeness of somebody as much as their temperament,” says 29-year-old artist Lola Schnabel of the series of dreamlike portraits she created this past year by pouring iodine over white ink drawings on paper and letting the chemical distort the sketch. The hazy, expressionistic images, which will be shown at Southampton’s Tripoli Gallery starting Thursday, are amber and violet-tinged representations of friends, family, and strangers build to loosely resemble the subject. “I drew my best friend [performance artist Loren Kramar], my father [artist and director Julian Schnabel], a soulful Hawaiian guy who was fixing my pool, and a beautiful Greek boy who came out of the water holding a 100-pound sea bass,” recalls the artist. “It’s a draining, intimate process—each is a record of meeting.”