Light in Dark Places…
Karyn Crisis

When a person is truly creative, their abilities usually span many genres. One such person is Crisis‘ lead singer of 13 years, Karyn Crisis, she of the epic dreadlocks. Her inspirations are things that also touch me deeply and haunt my imagination – shamanism, reiki, la vecchia religione, mediumship, clairvoyance. She paints in vivid, bursting colors that provoke emotions at a spirit level while they inflame the mind with thoughts. With her artwork, Karyn Crisis brings the viewer into her inner world, one that connects with the other planes of existence, the ones that most of us don’t see with our eyes. Many of her subjects are the powerful women that delve into the human spirit and the non-human universe – the healers who connect our energies to the currents of the world, the witches who embrace the potency of the goddess, the shaman who marry the spirit to the body. Her subjects vibrate with life beyond their own, and ask the viewer to expand their consciousness beyond what is kind and comfortable, to look into death and the living decay, to “see light in dark places.” Her Tarot series reinterprets those classic images from the occult, which she showed as a solo exhibition last year in Berkeley. After the jump, explore some of her recent paintings and sculpture…some of them are for sale on her Etsy shop…

For me, the world seen with the naked eye is only half of what’s going on, and the other half I see is much more interesting, as I found that I can communicate with ghosts, spirit guides, spirit attachments, illness, chakras, and angels. I see possible futures and feel the pain and imbalance of others. Difficult to explain, and I don’t really know what to do with all of this, nevertheless it’s a world that I am attempting to depict in my art now.