Karyn Crisis Solo Album Update!!

Finally! My solo album is underway! We recorded my vocals for pre-production yesterday in Davide's studio. While still the same spirit, I've undergone tremendous change as a being on this planet, and with this new material I've wanted to express devotion to my magickal arts. These songs are borne from seeds planted in my mind a year ago but have taken me a while to manifest: and we did this with guitars and electronics, which is how I wrote songs before joining Crisis. The result: sonic spells, ritual chants, ghost stories, all confessions of my experiences with one foot in this world and one foot in the next. I've also joined as singer for Ephel Duath! This isn't an April Fools joke.

Oil Painting Update

After I obsessed with the acryla gouache, I found my way back to my first love..oils. These photos are terrible, but I will have pro photos soon. They all measure around 30" x 40" and 36" x 72". The newest one, with the ravens, is still in progress...

And after the Doll series...

I felt a bit defeated by oils. So, I took a break from them and took up a new medium: acryla gouache, which is basically an acrylic polymer paint with added chalk-type agents that make the paint super-matte when dry. They also dry quickly as you are using them. The bold,bright color palette is what first attracted me to them. As I began to paint with them, since they dry quickly, they forced me to paint more primitively, and I found this a relief after working hard on oil techniques. So I abandoned photo and lighting references, and just painted from my mind. I attempted to capture they things I'd "see" when I'd use Reiki energy, or how I see angels, or what I'd see on shaman journeys,etc. I painted on printmaking paper, made a few hand sculptures from volcanic ash clay, and made several masks. I also aged some cotton rag paper and began some graphite drawings. I became obsessed with this body of work, which culminated in an open-studio.Most people were scared of the work, but some got it's similarities to tantric art; where one must accept the demon within as half of a whole. The point of the work was to attempt to capture what I see energetically when working with healing energy. People tend to think of "healing" as all white robes and peace and banality. While those things exists, and are a by-product of, the healing process involves facing onesself for all that is there, facing imbalances and hidden memories and possible spirit attachments and all sorts of clumsy, ugly parts of ourself in order to accept them as part of ourselves, thereby forgiving onesself and opening the doors or higher knowledge. To pass through those doors requires one to accept responsibility for the state of one's life...I also wanted to portray angels in their more controversial, but true light: as beings of immense power and terrifying light. They present themselves to us more often than not in visual terms that are not threatening to us, but they are immense warriors in truth.

About one Year Ago...

Davide set me up in a painting studio. It was far enough away from our apartment that I felt stuck there. This was the point: no distractions, just me battling myself through paintings for 8-12 hours a day. The goal was to learn color, light, shapes, and really grow technically. I started with a concept of painting girls paired with unsettling dolls, using colors I wouldn't normally gravitate towards. I used only oil paint and gradually added amounts of walnut oil. I discovered walnut oil while researching Old Masters techniques. Walnut oil won't yellow whites over time, and it's more fluid than linseed oil. I fell in love with it, and the completed paintings have a phenomenal and uniform texture and glow. However, this process takes a long time, because each layer of paint takes a week or longer to dry. So, it took months to work on these paintings, and though I had many more paintings sketched out with more provocative content, I grew bored...not of the learning process and what I learned, which was alot, but with the final product. While in my opinion they are beautiful and more realistic than anything else I'd painted to date, they were just not haunting enough, not unsettling enough..just not where I wanted to land. And, a habit of mine is to learn as much as possible as fast as possible..and once I feel I've learned the lesson and conquered the battle, I move on. Thus, these paintings were left unfinished as my passion took me onward.

Studio Update...

Here's a quick peek at part of a new oil painting that measures 36" x 72"...

Karyn Crisis Leatherworks on Polyvore...

http://www.polyvore.com/steampunk_fightin_sandworms/set?id=3507096

I know I am Spirit having a human experience. The Spirit part is unendingly interesting for me. It's the human part that I have difficulty with. I realize that in order to experience who and what I am, I have to be here in this body. And in this body is the only chance I have to reach enlightenment...I can't experience enlightenment out of a body..just as I can't experience myself in this set of circumstances on earth anywhere else. But I find so many of the things that are part of this human experience trivial and a waste of time these days: being in this clumsy body, having to earn money to pay bills, working any sort of job that isn't a personal creative expression. The world will say "but that's the way it is, you have to work, you have to do this and that.." but I say, why? Why can't I spend my time being in love and making art and music instead of dealing with commerce?
I believe I'm experiencing this very interesting life of mine so I could reunite with Davide now. And that's what keeps me on this planet, this incredible experience of unconditional love. And I think that nothing should get in the way of that experience. I want to have all the time to share with him all of the time, to love and be loved, to create and express, to experience the human and the spiritual that mean something to us. I don't want to deal with the rot of this world.