When you enter Barrett Lizza’s world in Fairhaven, it’s a good idea to move slowly and keep your eyes open. Collectable plates and ceramic cherubs share space with stuffed deer heads, saw blades, children’s toys and skulls. The man responsible for the unruly collection has created artwork and environments for some big names in entertainment, and he’s just as invested in creating art and design work for customers in Whatcom County.
Fairhaven Artist With a Background in Tinkering
“My mom likes to say I’ve been tinkering since I was a little kid. She had an antique store, and my grandpa would bring me to his little workshop and show me all these weird things that he made, so there’s this tinkering lineage,” he says. “When I was in middle school, I couldn’t really afford to put a new tire on my bicycle, but I found a rollerblade, and I replaced the front tire with it. I called it the Blade Bike, and I would ride that to school, racing the bus.”
Lizza was born in Seattle, but moved to Lynden when he was still young. After high school, he started going through what he describes as “eight million jobs,” including a stint at a Little Caesars pizza place that would soon help shape his future. He also started playing music in bands, which led him to live in Seattle for a while. But playing gigs and touring while based in the big city didn’t last. “Why would I stay in Seattle? It was so expensive I couldn’t do anything – I needed to go back home,” he says. He continues playing music today with Bellingham’s Duos.
A Designer Who Makes His Own Jobs
While Lizza was still adding a wide variety of jobs to his roster, there was a shift towards more self-directed work. Notably, he earned a cosmetology license from a local beauty school, which helped him open two barber shops. Also, he started a music venue before he made a business connection that took him to a much larger stage.
His mother was traveling when she ran into a stranger who would help Lizza broaden his horizons. “My mom met a lady on the airplane who was looking for more creative and inventive artists, so she gave my mother her e-mail,” he shares. “I wrote to her and showed her a bunch of pictures, and she hired me on as a lead designer for music festivals and VIP rooms.” In addition to designing backstage hangouts for artists like Madonna and Travis Scott, he had the opportunity to create functional decorative sculptures to celebrate the Seahawks’ Super Bowl victory.
Along the way, he was brought in to head up design for Magnaball, one of a series of festivals put together by the cult jam band Phish, and accidentally wound up building them a restaurant. “They were having an argument about what they should do for this farm-to-table restaurant. They didn’t know how to design it. I was sitting there with my little notepad, and I just drew up some ideas. So they said, ‘Looks like you got it,’ and gave me some money. I got a U-Haul and drove around the New York countryside picking up stuff to build a farm-to-table restaurant,” he says.
Setting Up Shop Back Home in Whatcom County
Between Super Bowls and Madonna tours, Lizza continued building his unwieldy resume doing construction, pumping septic tanks, building berry pickers and managing cupcake stores. He also dove into a new venture, growing vegetables using aquaponics. An ancient practice that has also seen high-tech innovations, it allows growers to pack dense crops into small spaces, in places that aren’t always friendly to farming. Locals may have seen his devices at the Vault wine bar in Blaine or growing fresh ingredients in Bellingham’s Black Sheep pizza restaurant.
Ultimately, the aquaponics project didn’t pan out, so Lizza took a moment to consider his next move. “I’m tired of working for corporate companies. I’m tired of always feeling like I have to do stuff for other people, and why am I always fighting my artistic self? Why am I always fighting me?” he says. “So I decided that I’m just going to do Barrett Lizza, the art and the design. Then I found this space, my store, two months before COVID.” While seeing the world shut down caused plenty of hardships, the pause and the stimulus checks gave him both steady income and some time to put his new plan together.
A Brick-And-Mortar Home Base For Art and Design
The result of Lizza’s nesting is BLD, which is often listed as an art gallery. But it’s also his retail space, a workshop and an office. Outside, his signs are sculptures that show more detail the longer you look, and inside, you’ll find more unusual details, like business cards made from decades-old unused postcards. You might see him hanging artwork on the already crowded walls, or sitting on a couch in front of an old cabinet television set showing a movie on VHS.
Here, clients can discuss custom building projects ranging from functional art to artistic furniture, or look into Lizza’s design services. It’s also an excellent place for him to plan his own creative projects, which have been seen in a number of area galleries. Recently, Lizza received a grant from the City of Bellingham to install an immersive gallery experience that filled a former brewery with a dizzying array of vintage televisions in a room lined with mirrors to create a limitless space.
Working without limits seems to be a theme with Lizza, and is reflected in the assemblages that serve as his business signs on the Fairhaven sidewalks and hang in his store for sale. The theme also carries over into his two-dimensional work. “If I make an abstract painting, I start making a form. And then I make a form off of a form off of a form,” he says. “Some of my pieces literally have 15 layers underneath what you see.”
All of these layers, seen and unseen, are best experienced in person, and the recommended way to enter into Barrett Lizza’s world is through the front door of his shop. Curious clients are invited to reach Lizza through his Instagram page and on his website.
BLD (Barrett Lizza Design)
905 Harris Ave, Suite 101, Fairhaven
