Stolen painting returned to Laguna artist, who hopes to ‘elevate’ others with new series
The sudden disappearance of an enormous painting roughly a decade ago had both its creator and police speculating on what might have happened to it.
Christiana Lewis Ulwelling, then the art director and event coordinator at the Laguna Gallery of Contemporary Art, had developed theories about how “Elevate” — a 14-foot-by-6-foot piece weighing approximately 40 pounds — could go missing from a garage beneath the gallery.
A police report of the theft was filed in February 2014. The painting, which had been wrapped in plastic, had been stationed in the garage for five months, placed against a wall among parked vehicles.
There was no surveillance footage available, but Lewis Ulwelling was sure that more than one person would have had to contribute to the theft, given the scale of the painting. She surmised at the time that a vehicle capable of transporting the piece would have had to wait outside the garage for it to be carried out.
The mystery still piqued her curiosity, but for all intents and purposes, Lewis Ulwelling had resigned herself to the probability the artwork would be lost to her forever. The large-scale painting, once a commissioned piece for a spec home in Beverly Hills that didn’t wind up there, had become a memory she was ready to leave behind.
“I thought that something would happen a lot sooner, and when it didn’t, I was just kind of like, ‘Well, I could put my effort into doing good works and doing good things, or I can put my effort in like revenge and obsession over this painting of what happened,” Lewis Ulwelling said. “I chose to go the other route.”
Lewis Ulwelling had also begun to see the irony in the situation.
“The piece is about elevating as a human, becoming the best version of yourself that you can by basically checking in with yourself every day, several times a day,” Lewis Ulwelling said. “The funny thing about this piece is because it was stolen, which is definitely not elevating, … I was kind of like, ‘Well, whoever has this, I guess they need to have it because maybe they need to elevate themselves.’”
“Elevate” was brought back into her life a couple months ago after she received an unexpected call from a man in the neighboring city of Laguna Niguel. When she told him that the painting had been stolen several years ago, she was able to arrange to get it back.
Lewis Ulwelling told the Daily Pilot shortly after the artwork first disappeared that the painting was valued at $60,000. She described the undertone of how she views it now as “disturbing” that someone would steal it.
This week she said she is considering painting over the work.
“Honestly, I was looking at it in a practical way, going, ‘Well, I am a very curious person,’ so to find out the mystery of ‘who done it,’ if you will, is really interesting to me and fascinating,” Lewis Ulwelling said when asked why she took it back if she was ready to move on. “The other part of it is [that] it’s a very expensive frame and canvas. I can turn this around and make it something really great. Why not? It’s several thousand dollars for this frame and the canvas alone, so let’s do something with it.”
Lewis Ulwelling, who said she has struggled with alcoholism, is now sober after a stay at a Newport Beach rehab facility.
Her latest series is focused on facilitating conversations around addictive behaviors and mental health to help others improve themselves. Many of the works include silhouettes of the body, with various elements within their interior, representing the various thoughts and feelings individuals carry with them and often choose to keep to themselves.
“What I’m working on is a series that really talks about [substance abuse] out in the open,” Lewis Ulwelling said. “Let’s talk about it, because if we can talk about it, then we can start to fix it. If we don’t talk about it, we can’t fix it, and so I’m talking about it through my art.”
She pointed out one of her artworks titled “Rumination,” in which she incorporated equations.
“It’s about standing there in yourself and not talking to anybody, and ruminating thoughts over and over. … If we don’t talk about it, and we stand there and ruminate, then we want to mask it with substances, so let’s talk about it.”
All the latest on Orange County from Orange County.
Get our free TimesOC newsletter.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Daily Pilot.
