Lisa Edelstein’s Dramas of the Mundane

Unlike many Jewish actors of her generation, Lisa Edelstein never anglicized her name. “So, I’ve always been publicly Jewish, and it’s definitely had an impact on my career,” she says. “It’s made me not able to be other things, and frequently when I got a job, my character became Jewish.” Some of her best-known roles are members of her tribe: House’s Dr. Lisa Cuddy, Relativity’s Rhonda Roth, The Kominsky Method’s Phoebe and, currently, Long Story Short’s matriarch Naomi Schwartz.

In her second career, as a burgeoning fine artist, her Jewishness can’t help but inform the work, too. Since the pandemic, the self-taught painter has been producing watercolors which seek to interpret a trove of her family’s snapshots of New Jersey domesticity. They provide a window into a vanishing twentieth-century American middle-class existence.

“When I started, I was exploring life in suburbia and the secrets we tell,” explains Edelstein. “But because I grew up in an Ashkenazi Jewish household, there were yarmulkes and other [visual] markers which became political after Oct. 7. It made me want to lean into it and demand the right to exist as a Jew in the diaspora. There are other versions of Jewish life, but this is mine.”

The works are now on view through Sept. 6 in a paired exhibit, A Palace in Time, alongside her husband, the painter Robert Russell, at L.A.’s Skirball Cultural Center. His pieces focus on Jewish ritual objects like Kiddush cups and yahrzeit candles. Her own capture fleeting moments of social togetherness.

Edelstein, 60, observes that the vintage nature of her photographic reference material is key. “We no longer have the same naivete about the camera,” she says. “We know our photo paces. The images I’m interested in are ones that have a narrative and that narrative is often unintentional.” Edelstein adds, “Now, we edit things out that we don’t intend. It hampers how we express ourselves and what we leave behind.”

For Edelstein, her paintings provide an opportunity to connect with audiences which is distinct from her Hollywood endeavors. “When you’re painting you get to have an idea and produce it,” she says. “That’s incredibly satisfying for someone who’s been in the entertainment business for so long, where there’s so many people and so much money and so many things that can go wrong. I can start my story and finish it. There it is — it exists in the world.”