160 Paintings, 160 Stories:
Discovering Savannah with Luba Lowry
Client Stories: Meet Luba Lowry
I first met Luba while working on an assignment for Stroll Southbridge. For those who don’t know, Stroll Southbridge is a local magazine for a neighborhood in west Savannah. Luba has called Southbridge home for 20 years, but her story before Savannah is just as interesting as the one she has built here.
Luba was born and raised in the former Soviet Union. At just 18 years old, she won a beauty contest that took her across Russia, Turkey, and Europe. Her original plan was to attend college in Russia, but things didn’t go as expected. While working at a travel agency in Dubai, she learned English and met her American-born husband.
In 2005, Luba became an American citizen and chose Minnesota as her home. The following year, a Presidential Scholarship brought her to SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design), where she planned to study fashion rather than art. But while at SCAD, her professors encouraged her to explore her artistic side, setting her on a path she hadn’t originally planned.
After graduating from SCAD in 2010, Luba opened a sewing gallery in City Market in downtown Savannah. That’s where I met her on a gray Savannah Sunday morning. As we talked, she told me how she had wanted to “liven up” the space and started hanging her paintings on the walls. Before long, people were coming in and asking to buy them. That interest eventually led her to reinvent the space as an art gallery. She still makes time to sew regularly, though, keeping that original passion alive.
As her art gained attention, Luba discovered that her paintings of Savannah were among her most popular. That inspired her to create postcard-sized oil paintings of different Savannah locations. Over time, the collection grew to 160 paintings.
When tourists visited her City Market gallery and asked about a particular painting or what a location represented, Luba found herself resesarching the stories behind the places she had painted. Those conversations sparked another idea: a book that would bring all 160 paintings together, along with descriptions of the locations featured in each one.
The result was Postcards from Savannah: The Art of Luba Lowry. In addition to the book, visitors can purchase actual postcards featuring her paintings at her City Market gallery.
Luba and I spent two hours capturing photos of her in her studio, painting, and exploring several of the locations featured in her book. She mentioned that a big art event was happening around Savannah that week, and she would be out and about painting at different locations. One day, she was on the river, another day she was on Skidaway Island, and by Friday, she was back in City Market.
I decided to stop by that Friday to capture a few photos of her participating in the event. While I was taking pictures, a woman approached me and asked if I was there just for Luba or if I was photographing the other artists, too. I explained that while I would have loved to capture the other artists, I didn’t want to interrupt them, so I was primarily there for Luba.
Luba and Susan Arrington
During that visit, she met Luba and purchased her book. She was so impressed by Luba that she made the drive back to Savannah the following weekend, just to spend two hours watching her paint.
I thought that was pretty special. It’s one thing to create beautiful artwork, but it’s another to inspire someone enough that they’re willing to make a five-hour round trip just to watch you do what you love. Needless to say, I think it’s clear that Luba has a special talent, but she’s also someone who makes a lasting impression on the people she meets.
That’s when she told me why she was there: she had come
simply to watch Luba paint for the two hours the artists would be working. Her name was Susan Arrington, and she had visited Savannah the weekend before from Warner Robins, Georgia, about two and a half hours away.
"She is who I'm going to aspire to be like"
-Susan Arrington
If you’d like to explore Luba’s work for yourself, you can find her book, Postcards from Savannah: The Art of Luba Lowry, at the Telfair Museum bookstore in Telfair Square, Barnes & Noble, on her website at lubalowry.com, and at her City Market gallery in Studio #7. Her artwork is also available through her website, her gallery, and Gallery 209 on River Street.