LILIA’S EYE CANDY, LLC

Lilia is a 19-year-old artist who uses an eye gaze communication system to create beautiful and unique works of art using her eyes.  Lilia leverages several software programs on her device to create digital art with unique colors, textures, patterns and digital effects. She is an entrepreneur, pioneering the idea of extending digital art from eye gaze to jewelry. 

Lilia’s family started the company to facilitate her desire to spread light and love to others through her jewelry and art, ensuring that each piece of jewelry is uniquely created from a different part of her digital art. Lilia’s Eye Candy, LLC filed a provisional patent for this unique jewelry-making technique and looks forward to a day when Lilia will be cured of Rett Syndrome and can run and manage the company on her own. 

Lilia is a serious art student.  Although she lives in Piedmont, California, she receives twice weekly art instruction from Professor Jason Hopkins in Chicago.  He holds a MFA from the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches students at several colleges in Chicago as well as remotely.  Lilia is a unique student because Rett Syndrome has left her unable to walk, talk or use her hands functionally, causing her to rely on eye gaze technology to communicate, learn and create extraordinary art.  Lilia creates her artwork independently with her eyes and directs her team on how she wants it converted into jewelry, choosing jewelry types, materials, colors, shapes, textures, etc. 

Professor Hopkins says her works hearken to abstract expressionists like Pollock and de Kooning, exhibiting a personal, improvisational emotional experience that champions the non-representational through nontraditional means.  But unlike her predecessors working in a tactile world, Lilia’s spontaneous action and color-field painting is entirely digital, made not from hand but by eye.  In this way, she subverts the process of “hand-eye coordination,” “willing” her colors, textures, and patterns into being, pushing pixels around like finger paints in a psychologically more immediate and intimate way. She is a virtual pioneer, championing the liberties of the creative soul, while Romantically defying disability and torpor.

Lilia would like to inspire others to achieve their highest potential by sharing what she can accomplish with only her eyes. 

In Lilia’s own words (written by Lilia during remote sessions with a school team member using partner-assisted scanning to make selections from a customized alphabetically-arranged keyboard with word prediction displayed on Lilia’s Tobii Dynavox I-12+):

How I create my art:   “I am able to do it in my head.  I will think of the most beautiful art.  Then I create it with my hands or my eyes.”

Lilia used her eyes to select the single words shown in quotes from her core word vocabulary pages in TD Snap on her Tobii Dynavox I-12+ to add to the starter phrases to share more about her art.

About her art: Using my eyes to create my art, “makes me feel love, excited, relaxed, proud.”  The art I create with my eyes is “comfortable, calm and beautiful.”

Examples of Lilia’s digital art:

 Examples of Lilia’s jewelry:

Statement Necklaces

Friendship Necklaces

Cuff Bracelets

Rad Leather Charm Bracelets

Rings