1) LuhVek isn’t really my last name… well kind of. My last name is actually LeVesque. LuhVek is the phonetical spelling of my married name (my maiden name is Diana - pin that thought). I adopted the variation because can you imagine telling someone that your website is “LeVesque.com” (and good luck spelling that one asshole)? Exactly.
2) I’m not from St Petersburg, FL. I actually grew up in a New England town in Connecticut. While not really a noteworthy place, if you’ve ever watched infomercials or any “as seen on tv” ads you may notice that a lot of them have a PO Box located in my hometown: Wallingford, CT. Yippee-zip.
3) I despise pencils, paper, anything chalky. Seriously. Can you imagine an artist that struggles with paper, pastels, pencils, charcoal, chalk? I actually feel physical pain in my jaw, teeth, and around my ears when I use, hear, and touch these things. Digital drawing has been amazing.
4) Speaking of aversions: I hate holes, heights, tight spaces, SOCKS and water pipes freak me the hell out. Weird right? I don’t make the rules, I’m just living em’. *shrugs in freak.
5) I did pretty well in school and showed artistic talent as a kid. Nerd alert… I wound up getting a pretty sweet seat in our town’s “T.A.G.” program and I even got to build muppets with one of Jim Henson’s former puppeteers, I learned how to batik fabric, create with polymer clay and so much more. I loved Saturday mornings at “T.A.G.”
6) If I wasn’t professionally art-ing for a living… I would be building ponds and water gardens. Seriously. I love ponds, fish, turtles, water features, plants, physical labor, working with my hands…and digging shit up with a backhoe wouldn’t be too shabby either. And then the rocks! How fun to arrange rocks and get them all aesthetic looking and shit? For real. I love it.
7) My two top front teeth aren’t real. I knocked both of them, and myself out cold when I was late (re-occurring theme in my life) and running to the bus as a kid. THE BEST part was that they were grown in enough to knock out but not “in” enough to repair, so I got to walk around for the better part of a year with these f’d up looking vampire teeth. That was fun. Needless to say, there’s not a whole lot of pictures from that time.
8) I’m introverted AF. Small talk with strangers, social gatherings, eye contact, large crowds… oooooo-weee: draining, uncomfortable, difficult; are all words that come to mind. But I’m trying to get better about being less introverted and am currently reading a book about “how to act around strangers so that you’re not such an absolute fucking cringe of a human being,” I’m paraphrasing of course and also I’ll let you know how it works out.
9) All of my artwork is in a way, a portrait of yours truly. Everything I create, is a reflection of my beliefs, my truths, my stories both personal and collected… my life experiences and lived observations. In essence the last 40+ years summed up uniquely in vibrant layers of salty text and sweet hand painted imagery layered in resin and often times dripping in both social commentary and copious amounts of glitter. They all have a story. They’re all a little bit of me.
10) Remember my maiden name? My grandma wanted to name me Diana Diana. For real. She knew that the birth of a granddaughter meant the end of the family name and what better way to fix that than naming me Diana2? Now even if I married, I’d still be a Diana. Oddly enough they f’d up at the social security department when I got married and so now legally my last name is Diana LeVesque (I had the intention of only taking my husband’s last name) and I’ve just been too lazy to fix it these last twelve years, so, grandma technically got her way.
There you have it, some fun facts about the LeVesque behind your favorite LuhVeks. And now you know.
