Pride Artist Feature: Grays Luzande
Visual Artist / Queer Storyteller / Dreamworld Architect
📍Vancouver, BC | 🖼 Showing at Liquid Amber Tattoo for Pride 2025
📸 @gracepaintings
“To be Queer is to have the courage to love freely and the confidence to live authentically.”
Every stroke of Grays Luzande’s brush feels like an invitation inward—to the shifting terrains of identity, emotion, and imagination. In her latest series, “Internal Landscape,” the Vancouver-based artist maps out a colourful and compelling topography of the self. Using primary colours and bold shapes, her abstract compositions feel like vivid emotional cartographies: snapshots of an inner world made visual.
For Grays, being a queer artist isn’t just a label—it’s a lived experience, a lens, and a lifeforce.
“To be Queer is to have the courage to love freely and the confidence to live authentically. To be an Artist is to boldly explore not just the world around us, but the vast internal landscapes within. Living as a Queer Artist has led me to shape a life that my younger self dreamed of.”
Grays’ journey into art was never a question of “if,” only “how.”
“I always knew I would find myself in the creative field, simply because my heart refuses to be anywhere else.”
A key moment that confirmed this path was a group exhibition in Brooklyn, New York—a formative experience that helped her realize the connective power of her work.
And that connection is everything. Whether with her viewers or within herself, Grays approaches artmaking as both an exploration and a ritual. One such ritual is her annual milk bath on New Year’s Day—also her birthday.
“I’ve been doing it for over a decade now. It was inspired by something I once read about Cleopatra bathing in milk (though I’ve never actually confirmed if that’s true). For me, it’s become a quiet, intentional moment to slow down, reflect on the year that’s passed, and set intentions for the one ahead. It’s also a way of reminding myself that I am royalty in my own Queendom.”
This blend of reverence, reflection, and reclamation infuses Grays’s work with power. Each piece is more than paint on canvas—it’s a threshold into lived emotion, shaped experience, and unapologetic queerness.
Grays on connection…
“I’ve had deep, honest conversations with incredible people, some of whom I just met, who told me my work ignited a spark inside of them.”
Featured Works from Internal Landscape
The Muse, The Mirror, and the Shield II
“Though life can feel like chess, and I, a piece in the match, there is strength in allowing myself to be the one who is moved, and the one who makes the moves. Seemingly opposite forces, coming together in one mind.”
This work explores the dynamic interplay between creative force (The Muse), inner truth (The Mirror), and fierce self-protection (The Shield). A visual self-portrait through metaphor, it captures Grays’ multifaceted experience of navigating both art and identity.
Rising with Intentions II
“Rising with Intention is a visual meditation on growth that does not follow a straight line. Through abstract landscapes built from primary colours, the painting maps internal shifts—levels, markers, and thresholds that resemble life’s evolving chart. Each colour, each segment, speaks not just of motion upward, but of conscious choice.”
This piece speaks to the nonlinear nature of becoming—of healing, rising, and reclaiming space.
Internal Landscape II
“Internal Landscape invites the viewer to step inside, to wander the hills and valleys of imagination and memory, and to embrace the strange beauty that lives within us all. It is both a paradise and a wilderness, re-imagined through color and form. This painting is a reminder that my mind is the scariest and most beautiful place I know.”
At the heart of Grays’ work is vulnerability—not for spectacle, but as a call to honesty and empathy.
“I’ve had deep, honest conversations with incredible people, some of whom I just met, who told me my work has ignited a spark inside of them. That kind of connection reminds me why this series—and these conversations—need to continue.”
In that spirit, Grays paints forward: for herself, for her community, and for anyone who’s ever needed permission to be fully, beautifully themselves.
🖼 Catch Grays’ work at Liquid Amber Tattoo & Art Collective through the Pride season
🎨 Follow her on Instagram: @graysluzande