There is a baby monitor on the studio table. Next to it, a stack of paper Lana Nguyen painted yesterday — terracotta, sage, a violet she mixed for clouds — and a pair of scissors. She has about two and a half hours, maybe less if naptime ends early, to get the next layer down on the piece she started last week.
It is not the artist’s life you see in movies. There is no long afternoon of contemplation. There is a window, and what she can make inside it. For a long stretch of her career the question that shaped every day in the studio was a practical one: What can I make in two and a half hours while my daughter naps?
The answer, it turned out, was a discipline — and a body of work that now fills an entire gallery.
How a Desert Gets Built Out of Paper
Stand close to one of Nguyen’s landscapes and the first thing you notice is that nothing in it was painted where it sits. Every cactus spine, every band of red rock, every cloud is a separate piece of paper. She paints the paper first, by hand, sheet after sheet, in the colors she wants — acrylics, alcohol inks, a little gold leaf. Then she cuts. Then she builds: shape over shape, plane behind plane, until a whole desert stands up off the wood panel with real depth between its layers. Last, she pours resin over the finished surface and lets it cure to glass, so light falls into the piece the way it falls into water.
Paper is patient. A cut shape waits. A piece can be built in layers because, for years, it had to be — a little at a time, over weeks, each naptime adding something to what was already there. The constraint that should have slowed the work is the reason it looks the way it does: meticulous up close, and somehow loose and alive from across the room.
A Desert That Turned Out to Be Home
Nguyen was born and raised in Kyiv. She is Vietnamese-Ukrainian, trained as a designer, and shaped by more than one country, language, and landscape before she found, in her words, “both home and an artistic identity in Arizona.” The desert was not an obvious place for that to happen. “It can appear harsh and quiet,” she writes, “yet is filled with resilience, color, and life when you look closely.”
Look closely is the instruction, and the work rewards it. Her Southwest is not the sun-bleached one of postcards. It is cobalt night skies over red rock, hot-pink prickly pear blossoms, gold-leaf moons, an armadillo in blue stripes, a javelina trotting under a crescent moon. The animals are never scenery; they are the residents, going about their evening.
Layered — Seven Years in One Room
This fall, for the first time, that much of the work hangs together. Layered, Nguyen’s solo exhibition, opens at the Creative Gateways Showroom in West Sedona on Thursday, October 1, 2026, 5–7pm, with the artist in the room, and runs through Thanksgiving Day. Seven years of desert: a three-panel nocturne nearly six feet wide, a four-panel run of red buttes and monsoon clouds, thirty-inch rounds of ocotillo and blooming prickly pear — and, if you look closely, one visitor from somewhere else entirely.
“We collect places, experiences, cultures, memories, and versions of ourselves along the way,” Nguyen writes of the show. “Nothing exists as a single layer.” A life assembled from pieces that did not start out together. A desert that turned out to be home. And a body of work made, for the most part, two and a half hours at a time.
Read the full story behind the exhibition — Layered, in The Journal at Sedona Art Galleries — and reserve your place for Opening Night. It takes ten seconds.
Lana Nguyen’s original works and prints are available at Creative Gateways Gallery in Tlaquepaque and online here. Her artist page has more on her process and portfolio.