A Visit To Lena Brazin's Studio 18/10/2024

Thus far, none of my interviews have involved spending over six hours with my interviewee beforehand, but Lena and I plotted this interview for after our shift at AP Fitzpatrick. We were both initially apprehensive – it seems harder to interview someone seriously after a day of endless chatter and dancing to tech-house, but as it turns out, the shift was easy. Lena speaks so eloquently about her practice that it is impossible not to just sit back and listen.

Brazin’s studio looks glorious in the afternoon sun. It is filled with work, stretched and unstretched, and the desk is a colourful array of oils and pigments. Brazin says that she is displaying some symptoms of the familial ‘hoarding’ gene but I think it’s pretty tidy. We have decided to talk about one of her new works: it is larger than many of her recent works and is at once familiar and unfamiliar. In the foreground, we see people sat on the tube, their backs to us. In the background, a distant figuration of mountains and cabins.




‘The Doors Will Open on the Right-hand Side’ is one of Brazin’s most recent works, inspired by her trip to the Dolomites. I found it funny that this painting, so dominated by a vision of London life, would have been inspired by her time in the countryside. Brazin tells me about her experience balancing her home in the countryside of Slovakia, and love of all things mountainous and her love of cities. When working on the painting, she wanted to include the inspiration from the Dolomites, as well as a classic scene from the London underground. The two pulls in her life are beautifully staged in this work, with neither taking precedence over the other. The tube for Brazin is a meditative place where she does most of her thinking and this is reflected in the composition. The tube here does not seem a place of hustle and bustle, but of peace and thoughtfulness. It doesn’t interrupt the mountains, more extends into them. It is foregrounded, and yet blends in to the colours behind.





I ask Brazin whether the push and pull of the countryside and more urban landscapes is a disconnect or a connection for her. She says it is a contrast that she often works through in her work. She used to feel she was being torn apart by the differences, but now she understands that perhaps a mix of the two is what keeps her inspired and motivated. She enjoys going back home to Slovakia but also loves the excitement and the painting scene in London. At this time in her life, she doesn’t want to feel trapped in either place and she can have both while she is painting.





But we also talk about the difficulty of having to explain what your paintings ‘mean’. It’s very easy for me to come into Brazin’s studio and talk about the autobiographical elements behind some of the content of her work, but naturally it is not that simple. Although in hindsight Brazin can sometimes see the workings behind why she might have painted one element there, and another elsewhere, it is not a scientific process. Often her paintings are a response to her current life experiences, whether abstract or finite, and she sees ‘meaning’ in them later. But she still wants the viewer to see their own stories in her work, because that is more important than pinning down a definite ‘meaning’ for Brazin. Her painting process is playful and reactive and the outcome is never pre-determined. Although she may be following a path as she paints, her joy really comes when the process is left open to chance and surprises.





She enjoys painting with water-based materials for the background, so that the layers are more responsive to the oil on top. Brazin is excited by the prospect of the base layers being beholden to the way the oils react, bleeding and blending. Although she sets out with an idea of her colour palette (at this, she points to a colour wheel she’s painted out at one end of her studio), most of her practice is led by intuition. Her work is often driven by colour, more so perhaps than the subject matter. Within the colours and shapes, she often leaves spaces open, so that you can see the background. These spaces add an element of spirituality to her work and within them you can see her confident line work. She doesn’t want to overdo her painting with colour, and so the spaces create moments of rest in the painting, as well as an element of multi-dimensionality. Her work is figurative, and yet the metaphysical and spiritual world is important to Brazin, and it is omnipresent in her paintings. The spaces beautifully blend the different dimensions of the paint and open up different possibilities within the canvas.





We also talk about the structure of her canvas. It has been stretched onto long wooden beams, with the ends visible at the corners of her canvas. She started making these stretchers at Turps art school, having been inspired by Basquiat’s work. She enjoys the rawness of working with the wood, and feels that it brings something grounding to her more spiritual and metaphysical work. For her this physicality is what pins her paintings down in reality, almost like a lightning rod (I learnt the Slovakian word for this: hromozvod). She is also always thinking about ways out of the painting, and these bars offer this, particularly seen here in ‘The Doors Will Open on the Right-hand Side’.





Brazin often works from photos and it has long been a fascination of mine that she sees something more in even the most incidental of images. The photos guide her compositions, which she used to sketch out, but now prefers a more immediate approach. Her paintings are rooted in a real place or a real thing, but when this reaches the canvas, it becomes its own entity. Lena’s intuition and feeling for the colours bring it into a new reality. She enjoys the emotional and subconscious impact of her colour choices, not just the formal or compositional considerations.





Brazin’s space is one of creativity and it feels very special to be able to talk about what she is working on, and what she is excited about. Her painting journey seems to me one of leaning into her life experiences, both physical and spiritual, and trusting her processes of creation and intuition.





Text by Emily Godwin, photos by Jon C Archdeacon.