Creative conversations with Christina Eve
Tell us a bit about yourself.
I'm Christina. I live near the beach on the west coast of Florida with my wonderful partner, our son who just turned five, and our dog, a husky-shepherd mix. I'm a visual artist and musician with synesthesia, a neurological merging of the senses that allows me to see shapes and color whenever I hear sound. Most of what I paint is a representation of what I see when I hear a certain song.
Tell us a bit about your creative journey - how did you get to this point? How had your synesthesia driven your creative process?
For most of my life, my creative practice and expression of my synesthesia was through music. I'd studied it as a child, went on to obtain my degree in music, and performed and taught for many years. During that time I painted just a few synesthetic works, but didn't pursue it at all. A few years back, I encountered a very difficult season of life full of loss and grief. One day, in the thick of this upending of my life, I just picked up some inks and started playing with them. The time I spent listening to music and using the inks to express what I was hearing and feeling became therapeutic to me. It gave me a place to process the complicated grief in which I was immersed. I didn't realize it at the time, but this practice also refined my artistic ability to depict the synesthetic images I was seeing. After a while, I discovered that much of what I was painting resonated with others. I think they were able to see those inexpressible emotions, whether grief, or loneliness, or those indefinable feelings embodied in music. That was when the shift from playing music to painting music happened, and since then I've just been following that growth wherever it takes me.
This neurological condition I have, synesthesia, merges my audio and visual senses. I see shapes, colors, and movement when I hear sound. These are called photisms. The most beautiful photisms are stimulated by music, and this is what I typically paint. Even if I'm not explicitly painting photisms, they make their way into my work, since they are always present in my life. Lately, I've been working on a series called SLEEP/WAKE, where I listen to music as I'm falling asleep, experimenting with states of consciousness and how the photisms change within them.
How do you fit your studio practice alongside your everyday life?
I actually spend far less time painting than I'd like. (Wouldn't we all like more time to paint?) Usually I'll set aside one day a week where I paint for 2-4 hours. I have some health issues that restrict the time I can spend in the studio. Plus, I need solitude when I paint, which is hard to come by when you have a preschooler. I've never been one of those types who can sit down to paint and then refill apple juice and then go back to paint and then help find a missing Lego piece, etc. I felt guilty about this for a while, separating painting and parenting, but then two things happened. First, I realized that I'm a better mom--more grounded, patient, and joyful, when I get that time alone to paint. That time nourishes me so that I can offer myself fully to my son and be present during time with him. Second, I setup a little table just for him in my studio where he and I co-create. This way the studio is not some off-limits space to him, but a place where we set aside special time to paint a piece together. This has been so rewarding. He loves it, of course, and I've been so inspired by the way he works. His imagination and freedom have definitely influenced my own work in unexpectedly wonderful ways.
Whats your greatest joy/biggest struggle as an artist?
The greatest joy as an artist is knowing I am doing exactly what I was created to do. The path I took to get here was painful, but the reward of getting to make something beautiful and helpful to others with that pain is so unspeakably fulfilling. The biggest struggle is the lack of financial security. I like knowing that I'll be able to pay my bills and take care of my family. Some months are lucrative, others are not. When you work for yourself that security is something you have to surrender. But I am growing in this area, too; learning to trust myself and find creative ways to make it all work.
Whats your best advice you'd give to other artists?
Be true to yourself. You are here on this planet for a purpose, and none can fulfill it but you. Look less at what others are doing, and listen more to your own unique and valuable creative voice. You will be most fulfilled, and therefore able to give generously of yourself to others when you do exactly what you were created to do.
Can you tell me a bit more about your SLEEP / WAKE series?
I started the SLEEP works just for myself, during last winter, a season which is always hard for me. My body struggles with the cold weather, plus my heart grows cold and heavy and waves of old grief always revisit. At that time, I was listening to Max Richter's album "Sleep" which is an 8-hour composition, designed to be listened to as one sleeps through the night. Max worked with some neuroscientists to learn about what the brain is doing during sleep. I like what he said about the composition, "For me, Sleep is an attempt to see how that space when your conscious mind is on holiday can be a place for music to live." The concept of the album is so intriguing, but it's also just sonically gorgeous. It was pretty much the only thing I was listening to last winter, when my body and heart just kind of were barely awake...I felt like I was hibernating. I think being in this sort of state, and repeatedly listening to "Sleep" primed me to see synesthetic images more clearly. I'd put on "Sleep" and close my eyes, and would just barely slip into sleep and then these remarkable images would appear. In this hypnogogic state, I'd see images that were dark and deep, but always had some subtle, soft light. The images were more abstract than what I usually see, and they moved much more slowly, so I had time to really take them in. Somehow inside these images was a landscape where I could walk and process the grief that was present in my waking hours. This hypnagogic state provided this unique other-worldly place where time was suspended, and I could spend as much or as little time sitting with pain as I wanted. What ended up happening was as the music of "Sleep" progressed through different sounds, the corresponding landscapes offered different spaces to to just dwell with my pain, or feel the full weight of it, or view it with great compassion. Ultimately I came to see the pain and the time spent with it as beautiful. This redemptive transformation, and the landscapes that hosted it, are what I try to convey in each of the SLEEP pieces I've painted.
Even today, I find great comfort in just looking at those pieces because there is so much inside them (which is why I made prints of several details of each piece; each is a almost a separate landscape in itself). I can still get lost in some small detail or shift in color, and am taken back to where this otherworldly journey took place. And I'm sure that this process is not over; just as aftershocks from life's traumas never quite disappear, so I believe that my SLEEP series, or at least some version of it, will always be a subject that I come back to.
“But in my own heart and mind, I meet God inside music. So when I paint that music, worship is born. I feel God’s pleasure and hear his voice when I paint music, I know he delights in what I create and that is what gives the pieces life. And that is what gives me life”
I'd love to know how your faith intersect with your practice as an artist?
My relationship with God is complicated. I like how Walter phrased it in the Ekstasis article: "Some readers might raise a theological eyebrow and wonder where Christina might be spiritually. She may even wonder, herself, about her own location." From the outside, my life doesn't visibly reflect that of a faithful Christian, or at least not the stereotypical view. But in my own heart and mind, I meet God inside music. So when I paint that music, worship is born. I feel God's pleasure and hear his voice when I paint music, I know he delights in what I create and that is what gives the pieces life. And that is what gives me life. As I said in the Ekstasis article, “Almost all of the time, when I’m creating a piece that I can feel good about, a requirement of mine is the sense that the piece is truly alive. That’s when I meet God; it’s a reminder to me that this is worship for me when nothing else is.
Could you tell me more about your process as an artist - how do you approach making art as a synthese?
Any work I create always begins with a song or a sound. When I work, I wear my clunky but stellar-quality headphones and loop whatever song I'm painting. My primary medium is ink, since it's fluidity best captures the movement of music, but I incorporate other materials too, like acrylic or pastel or gold leaf, and more recently, even colored pencils and crayons. As I continue my practice, I'm finding more and better ways of depicting the shapes, colors, and movement I see when I hear music. Inspiration is limitless, since so much good music exists, and I'll be forever pursing how to best capture and express the visual component.
How does being a musician intersect with your practice as a visual artist?
They are inseparable. I wouldn't and couldn't be a visual artist if I were not a musician. I still struggle to identify as an artist sometimes because I feel I'm still just wholly a musician who takes sound and puts it canvas with paint. It feels the same as when I play any instrument, only I'm just adding a visible component to the sound.
You can find more of Christina’s work on instagram (and here too) and her website.