Meet LUCAS MORELLI | Artist and Musician

We had the good fortune of connecting with LUCAS MORELLI and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi LUCAS, what role has risk played in your life or career?
I grew up with an adverse relationship to risk. I grew up undocumented in the United States and became fearful of the repercussion of any attention I brought to myself. This led to me minimizing myself in any circumstance I would find myself in. I lived a small life. I had a belief that an uneventful life would be my only path forward to being able to live happy and healthy. Hearing the conversations around me involving immigration as a child pushed me further into a shell that I spent years of my formative adulthood breaking out of.

My art became my escape. It was my light at the end of the tunnel. If no one else would see me, my art gave me that validation. It helped me cope with feeling isolated. I dug deeper and deeper into my craft, breaking every rule and turning every corner to continue exploring this aspect of self-validation I never knew growing up. The art became a safe environment for me to understand the fulfillment that came with the exploration of risk.

It became a game of seeing how much beauty I could find in the broken, unexpected, and forgotten places of my mind. I began to listen more closely to myself. I began to see with more color and hear with more detail. This openness started finding its way into other parts of my life. I took this approach to becoming a better friend, lover, and member of the community supporting me.

I look back now with years of this practice and see this beauty in life that I am so grateful to experience every day. It is a beauty that requires a new battle everyday. These battles have left me broken, but there is a transcendent gratitude beyond the satisfaction of being whole. Behind these battles, there is the beauty of the life we are given to live. This beauty is why I continue to make my art and continue to find practices that cultivate gratitude into my heart. I feel gratitude for my family, my partner, Maggie, my friends, my work, the community around me. I feel a freedom beyond the sum of my parts. This is what taking risks has given me.

I look at my life now as a chance to give the world back what it’s taught me. My shell continues breaking open further and further every day. I continue to look not for success or wholeness, but gratitude and acceptance. I hope to share this wonder I found in exploring every risk and opportunity.
 

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
My art is my path to my own freedom. It is my path to better understand the essence of being a human being. My music serves as a conversation outside of time. I want my art to be treated like a canvas. I want it to be picked apart, cherished, burned, destroyed, worshipped and hated, revered and despised. I want to give it to the world and watch it grow a life of its own within the eyes of humanity. My art is the expression of what I am in this current place and time. It’s as much a work of human genius as it is the consequence of untimely circumstance. My art exists without me but I don’t think I could exist with out my art. Ultimately, I hope my art gives people a space to express their own humanity.

I have been working with music and art since I was a child. I grew up listening to jazz music CD’s that my father would play and picking it apart to combine it with the music I was hearing out on the radio. I continued to dig away at different layers of music as I would grow. I was always adding to the ever-growing list of tools and ideas that would mesh and melt into each other in my head. I eventually began interning at different studios and creative spaces to hone the craft that would lead me to these full expressions of my childhood. So much of my music is the words I wish I could’ve said as a child. It became the safest place for me to turn to. It felt distant from the judgements and cruelty I saw in the world. As I grow, the messages I need to transmit grow with me. They become more nuanced and intricate. They become a self study for me to always be able to draw back to. They allow me to study my surroundings and thoughts. They are the messages of my place and time in this world.

So much of the challenge of success was dependent on my comprehension of balance. I needed to learn to bear the tensions of my mind and still ease back into a place of unrestricted voicing. In learning the craft of expression, this balance become a benchmark for me to follow in all aspect of my life, personal and professional. It began to reflect in the reactions I would receive. The feedback I’d receive from my art became a gratifying experience as I began to understand that, whether positive or negative, the reactions I felt meant I existed in this world.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I come from South Florida. South Florida has such a lush and beautifully diverse population and the food here is one of my favorite ways to appreciate the many different cultures. We would visit any number of the Caribbean, Asian, or South American restaurants that dot the landscape of South Florida. All this food would be punctuated with trips to the beautiful beaches along either coast or the many national preserves or parks that truly represent the incredible natural hospitality that Florida gives to its wildlife and plant life. The diverse natural life is truly an image found out of alien worlds. As an avid fan of comic books, one of my personal favorite places to visit in South Florida is Tate’s Comic Shop. Decorated to transport you into the pages of a comic book and riddled with books, art, toys, stickers, crafts, and music, this shop feels like a blessing to have so close to home.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I would like to thank my mother and father for being my examples of what an open heart looks like. I thank my sisters for being the closest people to me and teaching me more than they will ever realize. I thank my girlfriend for sharing her life and love with me. I thank my colleagues Jordan Solomon, Grace Kewl, Nadine Hankerson, Rob Roy, and countless others for believing in me in ways I could never believe in myself. I thank all my friends for sharing moments with me that I hold dearly.

Website: https://linktr.ee/NeonPrayers

Instagram: instagram.com/neonprayers

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@neonprayers

Image Credits
Tess Aptakin, Opal Feldman, Ricky Mulet Jr