Eve

Krisztina Lazar

Interview by L. Valena

So first of all, can you please describe what you responded to?

It was a gif of a woman sitting with her arms out, holding a vacant space. And then foliage kind of growing up and around her.

What was your first reaction to that?

It just really resonated with my work, in a way. I have done a lot of paintings with a female figure holding the earth, or holding some kind of crystal ball— it seemed like there was something there. But I really responded to the foliage growing. Plants have such a creative energy, and I really loved that aspect of it. I knew I wanted to work with that part of it as my source of inspiration.

And where did you go from there?

I was trying to think of what I wanted to create. I had a couple of ideas of where I wanted to go, but the more I was thinking about it, the more I realized that I had already started this piece.

I had painted the figure in the painting live at a festival four years ago, and it was completely different. The background was pink instead of black, there was a unicorn, and there were just a lot of other things going on. But the figure was there, with a different face, wings, everything. At some point I had blacked out some of it, and a week before the prompt I was realizing that the unicorn had to go. And then it was just sitting there, and I was just staring at it. It was just one of those pieces that hadn’t been resolved yet. And the more I was thinking about the prompt, and how I was imagining it in the first place, it just really connected to that figure. The idea of the fecundity of the earth, plants, and growth, just really found a home in that piece.

Is that something that you often do- revisit work and update it as you feel inspired?

Not really- I try to finish most of my paintings. I have a full-time job, so I really don’t have that much time to luxuriate on a piece. But once in a while, whatever my initial idea was just isn’t the right thing, and I haven’t figured out how to resolve it yet. So that was one of those that just ended up hanging around for a while. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could never quite figure out how to say it, until this. And then it really just finished.

What is it that you are trying to say in this piece?

I titled it Eve. It’s kind of this idea of the mother of everything. The figure in the middle. I once saw a sculpture of a woman in that pose— in standing splits. It was years ago when I first started this piece. The sculpture was beautiful, so I really wanted to use it as a reference. So that’s kind of the first part.

In the Renaissance there was this supposed secret society called the Rosicrucians. There’s a debate whether they even existed at all, but theoretically they were these ancient wisdom keepers. And whether they were actually people who met, or just people who contributed to a tradition of text only, is neither here nor there. But essentially, the idea of the Rosicrucians was this alchemical perfection of self. That meant a complete union of opposites.

In alchemy, the Queen and the King unite to create the universal Being, which is kind of the universal substance in a way. The Red King and the White Queen. It’s the idea that these two come together. One is Solve, and one is Coagula, and they come together to create the universal substance. It’s the idea of the union of Man, not man and woman, but the feminine principle and the masculine principle, to create a perfect whole. For the Rosicrucians, the hermaphrodite was this image of total selfhood, something that they spiritually aspired to. The perfect being is self created.

The being in the painting is kind of both feminine and masculine, in a symbolic way. And through their own creative function, birthed the world into being. It’s playing with a lot of those biblical, Gnostic, alchemical, Rosicrucian— it’s a giant soup of ideas. The goat, with a stag and a goat horn is this idea of opposites connecting. The goat, of course, is very symbolic of a lot of things in Western spiritual notions. The moon and the pomegranate— it wasn’t an apple in the garden of Eden, it was a pomegranate. But also, Persephone eats of the pomegranate when she’s in Hades when she wants to stay. The alchemical process that has to happen for Persephone to stay in Hades is part of what makes her queen of the underworld. So there’s this transformation that happens, and pomegranates are a really central part of that.

It’s the idea that when you have perfected the self, alchemically and spiritually, into a union of your parts, you create something new. In modern psychological terms, it’s about integrating shadow work, basically.

As a process, usually I take months and months to finish a painting, because I often paint in a technique called the Mishe technique. It’s a layering of oil and egg tempera, and it takes forever. Even if I’m just painting in oil, I use really tiny brushes, really detail oriented. I allowed myself to paint with brushes that were a lot larger, which I never do. I wanted to get it done, and it was really fun to finish a painting this fast. Just having the license to create something in a different way than I usually would was really fun. I really loved the challenge. I thought it was just totally cosmic, the prompt I got. It was so perfect.

Everyone always gets the prompt they need.

I love that! It was really fun to work with in the first place, but also to be able to use material that I always use in a different way was really fun too.

Do you have any advice for another artist who is approaching this for the first time?

Give yourself permission.

Call Number: Y47FI | Y49VA.laEve

Krisztina Lazar, a Visionary artist living and working in California’s Bay Area, creates images of Pop Shamanism, portals and visions that speak to today’s cultural climate of the occult, magic, psychedelics, meditation, pop, nostalgia, and the environmental movement. Originally from Cleveland, OH, she completed her undergraduate Bachelor of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in 2004 and her MFA graduate degree in 2011 at the San Francisco Art Institute New Genres department. Her paintings have been exhibited in group and solo shows throughout the United States and Europe, most notably at the H.R. Geiger museum in Gruyere, Switzerland.