Christina Pettersson

Artist Christina Pettersson works primarily in graphite on paper and also creates video and installation. Previously studying painting and sculpture at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, her current large-scale drawings and self-portraits are often based on literary works and figures, modern fairy tale and myth. Christina is represented locally by Spinello Gallery in the Design District.

An interview with Christina:

Originally from Stockholm?

Yes. We moved to the States when I was young, but spent many summers back in Sweden. Those trips left strong early memories. My grandmother lived in a small town, where my father grew up, and her house had a real garden. It was so much better than the suburbs I grew up in.

Almost all of my memories of her revolve around food, from digging tiny new potatoes out of the dirt to the kitchen smells of sugar, yeast, cardamom, cream, and meatballs. She even made pancakes for the hedgehogs in her garden, which made perfect sense to me as a child. In the earliest memories, her floured hands were right at my eye level. I loved those hands, and I can still picture them more than anyone else's. Maybe it's why I like drawing hands so much.

Sweden is mostly woods and rolling hills. We would spend hours picking wild strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, cloudberries, and lingonberries, until my hands bled beautiful colors. My interest in fairy tales began there because that's where the woods grew, my own Grimm Brothers' Black Forest, dark, elvish greens I still achingly miss in Miami. The language I could not yet speak as a child was there too, and like all things we hear but cannot understand, had a sort of magic. It made you feel like a character in a storybook.

Differences between Stockholm and Miami?

Stockholm to Miami is, well, a little like Bethlehem to Gomorrah. Sweden is almost perfect, while Miami seems a mess! Yet I admit to having discovered I like messy too. I wish I could live in both places, snowy socialism and warm debauchery. Living here, I love the summer storms, the late nights, the crazy mix of people and lives.

I especially like the older Florida stuff that most people don't notice--the Hialeah Race Track, Vizcaya, the Venetian Pool, the Mai-Kai, living down the street from where the Playboy Club was, and the neon signs of motels that still bear the names of faraway places. It is a city founded on fantasy, borrowing from whichever culture suits best at the moment.

There is an intoxicating vibe of possibility. I'm sure this has a lot to do with my predilection towards taking on various characters in my work, and the appeal of constantly re-envisioning myself as history's characters, without being beholden to them. The tragedy here is that not enough people recognize that more local history is worth learning about and saving. I would take Sweden's politics, economy and environmentalism any day.

Early drawings?

One of my first drawings hung in my parents' bedroom many years. A cowgirl with a frilly jacket and it still is one of my favorite drawings.

Narrative in your artwork?

When we write the stories about ourselves we inevitably change them, so why not steal from the better narratives of the Bible, Shakespeare and Greek mythology?  In art, the whole of history becomes a record of my own life. A self-portrait becomes a bodily stand-in for the viewer, to imagine in the various scenarios I put them in.

The fact is they are not much about my personality. I want to be a storyteller. Rauschenberg said that narrative is the sex of art, and I think I understand what he means. I am drawn to the pleasure and pain of beautiful tales, and it is not about fulfilling logic.

A drawing is more primal. It is the demon's whisper that no book is closed forever, so keep digging. I would rather resurrect Ophelia from Shakespeare's murdered chambers, without any idea of what will happen, than to tell you what I already know. By dressing myself in the clothes of history, I am trying to restore an epic and mythological dimension to life, a sense of awe and reverence for the world.

Creative process?

Stuff piles up for years in my head or suddenly it bursts out of the sky. Often I understand a piece much less, the why of it, when it's finished. I am as surprised as anyone at what I find. But in retrospect I wouldn't want to know too much, I think that would be the death of me.

Pragmatism is a good idea for cabinetmaking but not so much for drawing. Other than knowing your graphite preferences (definitely Tombow pencils) and the best way to photograph things or the one company you can order the really big art paper rolls from.

The process is everything, but mostly private, that is, not necessary to understand in order to look at the work. Emerson says, "A man is what he thinks about all day." Our culture has somewhat lost the art of being alone, but luckily art still makes you pretty good at it. You also understand how important it is to have unplanned time, playtime, time even to feel bored. Have a wandering mind!

The literary and visual arts?

I am more influenced by writing than anything else in my life. I love words. If I had a thousand years I would lounge around in all the great libraries reading all the books worth reading. It's a shame most people only read stuff like Shakespeare in high school. Writers were great prophets in the past, like oracles or augurs. Tennyson was one of the last poets famous enough to have crowds of people follow him down the street to his home on the Isle of Wight. That was long ago.

Drawing somehow reminds me of writing, the black and white purity of it, though it lacks writing's total ability to be removed from any particular space and time, and live inside your head. I try to achieve that kind of timelessness in drawings by using the white of the page, but it's not the same. Recently, however, I have been working with video, merging words with images, which is really exciting. I secretly hope to publish some kind of book someday.

The brick drawings?

The brick drawings are closer to me than any others, and are self-portraits more than the recent figurative work. They are the true autobiography of seeking out and visiting the homes of writers I love. The kind of love that compels you to cut a lock of hair while your beloved sleeps.

I have learned so much about myself from books. I never thought of myself as a Southerner until I read Faulkner and Wolfe, visiting their Southern homes, and felt that I was also going home. I never realized how much I believed in poetry until I stood at Yeat's tower home in Ireland and thought of this solitary man writing one of the best poems in the English language, "The Second Coming." There you behold the great sovereignty of the individual.

Each brick represents that greatness. The brick drawings are also more about drawing, itself. I pushed what I thought drawing could be hard in the bricks, boring a kind of hole in the paper that should have reached China. And in the end what I saw was myself, my true life, shining back.

I finished the series by making a brick out of dirt stolen from beneath the bedroom window of my own childhood home and bronzing it. So whereas the bricks of dead writers are, in the end, artifacts, my bronze brick has just been cast out of fire. My life goes on. They are deeply romantic pieces I think, holy relics, and unlike most of my other work, it will become harder to part with them as time passes. They are my dead family.

Prophesy and time passage in your work?

Prophesy has more to do with the past than the future. Most of us spend more time trying to decipher our pasts. Our history is a tragedy of separation, in all respects, from place, from person, but most of all from one's self.

Memory is definitely not a one-way street back to the past. It's more like various spaces interlocking, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like. It's alway being rewritten, and impossible to objectify.

This is where nostalgia comes into play, which I'm very interested in. The writer W.G. Sebald talks about it better than anyone else I know of, particularly in relation to images. I detest actual nostalgia, its nauseating ache for that which never actually was, and its manipulation in politics and commercials, but the language of it, the texture, is fascinating.

When Bernini was sculpting his bust of Louis XIV, he declared to observers, "My king will last longer than yours!" Art can have an unexpected longevity, and in a sense, every piece becomes an homage to something in life immediately lost; an idea which can never be repeated, and which may very well outlive you. Photographs are the best example of what I mean, capturing something already gone, but every work carries this idea. Life goes on, but it is the lives, the lives, the lives that disappear. Making art reminds me of how much time has passed, and this can be very sad.

But that's just an aftereffect, and only now and again. It has nothing to do with why I make art. I once heard Ray Bradbury tell an interviewer, "I don't know if I believe in previous lives, I'm not sure I can live forever, but that young boy believed in both, and I have let him have his way. He has written all my stories and books for me." That's exactly what happens with art. I am still doing what I liked doing most at six and ten and fourteen, and twenty. And thirty-five. I find I am not so much interested in telling you the stories of my past, which keep going out the door, as imagining new ones.

Three artists you admire?

Tacita Dean, who has been referred to as the poet of lost things, things that are disappearing, dying out, becoming obsolete, and who continues to use real film, in order to make work that dares to wait for things to happen, to go in between.

Toba Khedoori, who also uses the really big paper, and doesn't fill it up, but draws very precisely and perfectly upon it. Lucas Cranach the Elder, a German Northern Renaissance painter, to go off on a totally different tangent, because he's one of the earliest painters I know who really put his own personal weirdness into his work, not overdone, but consistently done. A kind of early Balthus. The closer you look, the stranger it seems. I like work that kind of creeps up on you, and Cranach is way creepy. So that's three for this week anyway.

Christina Pettersson; www.christinapettersson.com.