Honoring Chaos

It’s a freezing, gray, afternoon, even though it’s the end of March. I’m meeting Cristi López in a coffee shop on a Saturday afternoon in Wicker Park. Naturally, I’m surrounded by serious looking white men in too-trendy outfits, typing away at the next great American novel as I scan the crowd for Cristi; I know what she looks like because I follow her on Instagram, a strange semi-novel reality of being a young person, that we laugh over once I finally find her.

A recent Gainesville, Florida transplant, Cristi’s portfolio is fairly prolific. A glance at her website or Instagram, and you’ll see a variety of paintings, illustrations, even poetic short stories featuring predominantly womxn at their most intimate: in states of undress, cutting their hair, weeping, eating. Each piece has a narrative structure, every womxn was in the middle of a story, and I wanted to know more about the storyteller.

Cristi is incredibly gracious: easy to talk to and laugh with, and we quickly discover we are both the children of immigrants. She is of Dominican, Cuban, and Spanish descent. Being mixed race and first generation myself, I am endlessly fascinated with the ways identity informs the stories artists tell. We begin to talk about culture and she tells me about the origin of predominant iconography in her work: string and balls of yarn.

“One of the first pieces I created with that motif, I made when I was 18. I was in this experimental, high concept art program at the University of Florida … I made a piece that was these two or three balls of yarn, and the strings coming together to form this human figure that was comprised of all of these different sources. The piece was a pretty simple metaphor describing how I have always felt that my identity is...I have one foot in the U.S., one foot in the Dominican Republic; I’ve never been to Cuba, I’ve been to Spain only as a tourist. I’m not ‘Latina’ enough for people here to consider me ‘Latina’, but when I’m the Dominican Republic, I’m considered white. I’m considered a tourist. I live in this limbic state.”

We talk more about this neither-here-nor-thereness, and the constant reckoning with being authentic to your own voice and identity, Cristi remarks, “My parents are immigrants and they really instantiated this idea that wherever you go is home, you make it work. You push forward.” This seems to speak to Cristi’s way of being as well as her way of making: appreciate your circumstances and remember where you’ve come from. I ask how her background, and this mentality, inform her work.

“Even just in aesthetic ways. My color palette is really warm. Where I’m from in Florida is a swamp. There’s something about the humidity or something that makes the Sun so golden. It seeps into everything, everything glows and is kind of hazy. There’s this dreaminess to it-” She laughs, “I mean, it’s a hell hole, it’s so hot, but that dreaminess … is so different than anywhere I’ve been. Those bright, saturated colors from there and that golden light. That finds its way in my artwork, probably in ways that I’m not even cognizant of.” This so clearly translates to her illustrations and paintings. It feels as though every subject is bathed in golden light, almost as if they’re swimming in it. That lyrical sense of motion she captures is something incredibly unique; the execution takes a skilled hand and a keen eye. I ruminate on this as I take notes and stop-

“So, why painting?”

“I’ve been drawing since I was a child … that’s always been my primary mode of expression. When I got to high school, I focused primarily on photography. I found that it was a comfortable way to express myself … I’ve never felt connected to my physical appearance. I was always shutting it down. There were things about my appearance that didn’t mesh with the environment I was in, so photography was this thing that allowed me to control how I presented myself to the world. It allowed me to explore and post things that maybe didn’t mesh with a girl from a Catholic, Latin American family. Photography made me feel so powerful, in my own expression.”

She remembers initially wanting to be a fashion photographer.

“That was my absolute goal. Then, my first year of college, I had this amazing opportunity with my photography where I was featured on Vogue Italia, they take submissions from amateur photographers and feature a different work every day on their website. I had a show in Milan, it got wild after that. But at some point, it hit me: I don’t want to do this. This isn’t it. I don’t feel connected enough to the work. There’s a detachment, just by the very nature of photography, which for me personally, didn’t work.

I needed my hands. My hands were my first language. As I was having these revelations, I was also really getting back into my drawing. I decided I wanted to transfer schools. I wanted to go to a school where I could really focus on technique.” She laughs, commenting that she sounds dramatic. I assure her, I live for a dramatic, life-changing revelation.

She set out to apply to art schools that would give her the classical, technique-driven training she was craving saying at one point, “I wanted to get to know the language before I could speak it.” Cristi found herself at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, FL, taking as many figure drawing classes as she could manage. It was there where she developed her foundational, technical skills as a painter.

It’s interesting that language comes up in regards to her visual art, as she also pairs her illustrations with short stories.

“It’s always helped me to write out my thoughts. My mind itself is a cacophony, there’s so much going on. I find that my truth is often distilled if I can just write. Whatever I’m writing feels more real than the noise in my head.”

After I make a note to embroider that quote on a pillow, I refer back to her writing. They feel like a natural extension of her paintings, each of her women could jump right out of their frame and into her stories. They feel so naturally and intrinsically connected, and I asked if she plans on continuing to marry her words and her images.

“I’d definitely like to share more. I can’t look at my pieces that are inspired by my short stories and poems without hearing the story.”

I’m glad about this. Her writing has the same soft, visually alluring tone that her paintings do. One story that stands out in my mind entitled The Angry Daisy, tells the story of a masochistic, emotionally abusive daisy, and the girl who tried to keep it happy. It is striking, heartbreaking, and familiar. I think of myself and all the womxn I know who’ve wasted tears on daisies that would only ever want more.

“I never want it to feel like exploitation. I never want the viewer to relish in her pain. I want to show that this is an emotion. This is real. Within her vulnerability, she is strong. She’s bold, beautiful, and strong and vulnerable. Among many things, that’s what I hope to communicate. My work is delicate, but it is bold. As am I. I can be very soft, and very feminine, but when I decide to speak my mind or laugh really loud, I’m in your face a little bit. That conflict elicits a conflict in how I’m perceived and conflict in me. Deciding who I have to choose to be, and now realizing I can be both.”

This balancing act of softness while taking up the space necessary to survive as a womxn in this world and what it can do to a body/mind/soul reminded me of a reference in Cristi’s bio to her wanting to apply her work to self-help and mental health-related content. I asked her about this and the view of ‘art as therapy’ writ large.

“I love to read about psychology, self-help, and mental health. I’ve found in that genre, the art is TRASH. Like stock photo trash. My ultimate goal is that I want to be an illustrator and artist who brings awareness to these mental health issues by acting as that initial interim. At this point, there’s no title, image, or slogan that we haven’t seen five million times. If I can make work that’s personal, allegorical, and relevant to anxiety, depression, general mental health struggles, and create that bridge to make that content more accessible, maybe people can find their way to healing faster. That’s my ultimate goal. That obviously comes from my own struggles, which is why I want to make this helpful and important literature which has been so inaccessible more relevant and bridge that gap.”

Hearing her articulate this makes my perception of Cristi’s work so clear to me. Her work is an honoring of struggle, an honoring of womxnhood and sisterhood as divine medicine. She is bold and she is brave. She is fighting for a world that is softer and more vulnerable through her art. Her work reminds you to slow down and check in with yourself, to kiss yourself on the forehead, as one of her subjects does in my favorite piece of hers. It also reminds you that you’re flawed, and hurting; she celebrates those open wounds and makes space to air them out. There’s no healing without recognition, and her work is both healing and recognition.

“I am chaos. I am volatile. And that’s beautiful. I’m learning to love that about myself, but we do not live in a culture where that is honored. If I can embody that in my work and honor it that way, then fuck yeah, that’s what I’m going to do.”.

// BY GLORIA IMSEIH-PETRELLI

// PORTRAITS BY LIZZ ORITZ