Helen Lundeberg is the seemingly mythical "cool-girl" everyone talks about.

She was super smart, pretty and talented but not all in your face about it. She was put in a Stanford study on “Gifted Children.” She wanted to be a writer but then went to art school on a scholarship and wrote the manifesto for the Post-Surrealist movement with her professor-turned-husband. She became a major American artist by the time she was 30, with only two years of training. She never considered that she couldn’t be an artist because of her gender, even though things were hella sexist in the early 1900s. And on top of all that, she looks really cool when she smokes. Are you jealous yet? Because I am.

Born in Chicago in 1908 but raised in Pasadena from the time she was 4 years old, Lundeberg had those chill California vibes ingrained in her. After grade school, she was forced to take care of her ailing mother, but after her death Lundeberg went to Pasadena Community College where she studied English. She wanted to continue her education but as it was during the Great Depression and she was broke, she couldn’t. That is until one of her mother’s friends offered to sponsor art school for a couple of months. This is when her career really took off.

She, like many of our favorite artists (lookin’ at you Lee Krasner), had stylistic ADD. She has been classified as a Post-Surrealist, a Hard-edge painter and a Subjective Classicist. But honestly, it didn’t really matter what she did because she was stupidly talented at everything and the critics always loved her. She once stated, “I have seldom felt misunderstood by critics, most of whom have recognized that my work is both lyrical and formal, and that these elements are inseparable and constant.”

If struggling and fighting the critics isn’t what being an artist is all about, then I don’t know what is and I certainly don’t know where the heck Helen Lundeberg came from but somehow she just got in there and changed the game without anyone noticing. I can just picture her talking about making it as an artist with all of the confidence of Elle Woods from Legally Blonde after she got into Harvard Law bluntly saying, “What, like it’s hard?”