- Lindsey Anderson
- Apr 7
- 7 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
An Interview with Larysa Myers
Haley Laningham
See more of Larysa Myers’s work here.
The suite of Larysa Myers’s work we have taken for this issue comprises eight complex and ethereal graphite drawings. Her pieces often bring the natural or occult close to the body, and more specifically, female forms. Of her own work, she says:
My paintings and drawings explore personal history through the universal and the cyclical, the mythological and the contemporary. It often reflects on ideals of motherhood or femininity and its dualities. The body is reduced to a female archetype as the form is silhouetted and manipulated. Settings are domestic, wild, mundane, and fantastical, each opening into different parts of the psyche and identity.
In this interview, we discuss Myers’s sources of inspiration, the reasons behind her choice of subjects, and her relationship to her medium.
-Haley Laningham
Haley Laningham: How would you describe your journey to becoming, and in being, an artist?
Larysa Myers: I made art through childhood but lost that practice in my teen years and ended up majoring in finance in college. I worked in commercial and investment banking until I was in my late twenties. I started in Chicago but moved to New York City because I really wanted to learn about art. A few years after moving to NYC, I met some friends who worked in galleries there and learned about art through them. I quit working in finance and worked in design, textile design, and artist-assisting while I worked on my own work and took classes.
HL: Who are some of your artistic influences and how did you come into contact with them?
LM: When I first began studying art I delved into the classical and academic figurative artists and processes before learning about contemporary art and different kinds of figuration. I have many academic favorites, such as Pierre-Paul Prud'hon and Ingres. I’m always looking at different images. I found the Chicago Imagists and was especially drawn to Sue Ellen Rocca and Roger Brown’s paintings. I liked how pattern was used in the Chicago Imagists’ work and faces were obscured, patterned, or in shadow. Many of their works were drawings or works on paper. I love Rousseau and his naive and still dreamlike paintings, many being of the tropics. Many times, I look for symbols to represent ideas and am drawn to the symbolism and surrealism in Magritte and Gertrude Abercrombie. When I first started working on these drawings, I was influenced by Frida Kahlo and Paula Modersohn-Becker for their honest depiction of their life experiences and fertility. Also, my husband designs exhibition books for the Neue Galerie in New York City, showing German and Austrian art and design and many works by the Weiner Werkstatte. The Weiner Werkstatte designed many inventive textiles, objects, and furniture pieces that I draw inspiration from for my interior scenes. I’m also very drawn to the surrealist and symbolist artists working today such as Julie Curtiss, Emily Mae Smith, Elizabeth Glaessner, and Gahee Park; their work feels suspenseful and psychological.
HL: Ghost, River, and Genie both feel particularly surreal or magical. What is your process in coming up with ideas which lead the work to skew towards this surreal construction of frame?
LM: I always work at night. I think this has allowed my work to become more surreal and dreamlike, closer to a subconscious state. I’ve always been interested in surrealist works and combining different parts of paintings and images I am drawn to. I try to relax from the day and get into my own imaginative world, take a walk, or look at some images and see what ideas may spontaneously pop up or what I’m interested in.
HL: How did you get the idea for the piece we’re using as our cover, River?
LM: I remember I wanted to depict a feeling of being shut in or crawling into something—I often use the image of a shell in my work. It is a vessel or symbol of birth or protection. I liked the shape of the clamshell and remembered Hieronymus Bosch had one in his painting The Garden of Earthly Delights and used that as a reference. My figure in River is sleeping in the shell next to a black river at night. It is sort of a balance between ease and unease, protection, and exposure.
HL: Is there an overarching intention—of feeling in the viewer, of story, of play with perspective—which you intend to impart on your viewer across all these pieces?
LM: To me they are recording personal experience, which I think can become universal. They contrast interior domestic scenes, which are more mundane, refined, and patterned with the natural world. This reflects the interior life, but is primordial, wild, and magical. Both worlds use symbols.
HL: How would you say you want your work, which records these personal experiences, to reach the universal?
LM: Everyone has the same cycles in their lives of birth, youth, middle age, old age, and death. Our lives mirror the cycles in nature and the seasons. Although we have different experiences, they are not entirely unique, and we all have the same basic emotions.
HL: In Moon Bathing, Waiting, Mother Saint, River, and Smoking in the Mangroves, there are ostensibly feminine figures. What leads you to draw female figures?
LM: They are female figures and derived from my own personal experience. In 2015, I moved from New York City to Beacon, New York. In Beacon I was immersed in nature and the seasons for the first time in many years. I also had my first child and saw how the seasons mirrored the seasons of our lives. The following year, I was pregnant with twins and started making work in my current style. I was thinking a lot about what life is as a mother and how women are depicted in culture, mythology, and religion. The forms were inspired by idealized female figures depicted in Renaissance paintings, combined with elements from “naive” art. They reflected on ideals of femininity and motherhood and their dualities. My work is a lot like writing or recording my own personal experience, these experiences are not unique to me but universal. Snake Charmer by Rousseau has always been one of my favorite paintings and one I always go back to. It depicts a backlit female figure in shadow playing the flute to serpents in a jungle. It feels very primordial, feminine, and mysterious.
HL: How does your experience with motherhood shape your pieces?
LM: I began drawing again because I saw the image of this drawing, Snake Charmer, in my mind and transcribed it. I was pregnant for the second time and felt really powerful and grounded and magical. This was before I found out I was having twins! It shows a silhouette of a pregnant figure with star-like marks on her body in the jungle at night.
HL: Red Tide, River, Smoking in the Mangroves, and Moonbathing have natural elements or settings. Is there a specific place from which you draw inspiration in the natural world? Is there an overarching message, feeling, or sense of relationship you're seeking to impart about the natural world?
LM: I use places in nature as metaphors of internal states or reflections of interior life. After moving out of New York City, my natural surroundings began to have an impact on my work; many times an idea will come from the way I feel out in nature. Being in landscape is like a reflection of interior life. Currently I live in Florida, and it feels like a foreign land—I have never lived in the tropics before. I feel like an outsider when I think about the heat in the swamps, the heaviness in the oaks, the aqua waters, the beaches and palms.
HL: What drawing materials do you work with, and what kinds of drawing techniques do you use and why? I'm thinking specifically of your use of pointillism here and there, but what else is of note about your style?
LM: I work with Japanese papers—they have a very delicate and vulnerable feeling. In textiles, I was attracted to the back-and-forth repetitive motion of weaving. Drawing is akin to this for me as the repetitive mark making dispels anxiety. I studied classical drawing, and it departs from this— but there are lots of gradients. It can be very detailed. Drawing is a great way to record and is not always meant for others to see. It feels very fresh and personal to me. My time when I began these drawings was limited with twin newborns and a two-year-old, so this was my only option as far as art-making, and the constraint forced me to focus on the image and symbolism.
HL: What are the rewards and constraints of working in greyscale to your mind?
LM: The greyscale feels like an imprint or a memory. Drawing was traditionally used in preparation for painting and it was not meant for everyone to see. It feels more personal. To me, drawings feel fresh and genuine, but they do not jump at you from across the room. They need the viewer to get closer to them and have a more intimate relationship.
HL: Is there anything to which you’d like to direct our readers’ attention?
LM: No, that is all! Thank you for the interview!
LARYSA MYERS studied drawing and painting at Grand Central Academy and textile design at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, developing a love for classical drawing methods and pattern making. After leaving the city and moving to Beacon, New York, she started a family and began a new body of work focusing on drawing. Recent group exhibitions include “Aura” at Wilder Gallery, London (2024), “Paintings of Common Objects” at Fortnight Institute, New York City (2023), “Charta” on the Fortnight Institute Salon (2022), “I Walk Through Walls” on MePaintsMe.com (2022), “Night Scenes” at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, New York (2021), and “Soft Temple” at Mother Gallery in Beacon, New York (2019). Her work has been featured in Maake Magazine and ArtMaze Mag.
HALEY LANINGHAM is a PhD candidate in Poetry at Florida State University. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and acts as Art Editor for Southeast Review.