A different type of artist

Artist Christina Muraczewski uses math and science to create abstract creations

By Jamie Elizabeth Hall
Published: September 8th, 2008 | 7:05pm

For the past nine days, I have been staying at my childhood home in Missouri, spending time with my nephew, whose favorite pastimes include coloring, talking about Star Wars, and coloring characters and scenes from various Star Wars movies. The topic of discussion for the adults is his “artistic development,” and whether he should be encouraged to color inside the lines or do whatever he wants.

At four, he is ambidextrous and switches the use of his hands as he progresses from one side of the page to the other and his “style” is inconclusive — it changes by the minute. I am observing with interest because it corresponds directly to an article I’ve been (slowly) constructing about an artist I met at a party a few years ago in Los Angeles.

Christina Muraczewski is tall and pretty, and when I met her she was walking around with some exotic — and exhausted — live bird in her arms. When I asked what she did, she told me she was an abstract painter, and I mentally added her to my internal filofax of artists and creative-types I hoped to interview.

When I actually began to research her work I was surprised. Perhaps it was her ease with the bird, but I expected creative, colorful canvases — stereotypical abstracts and layers of paint. Muraczewski’s work is anything but.

Muraczewski, I realize, upon reading her artist’s statement, is hardly the free spirit her column dress and random bird she carried in place of a handbag might have indicated. Instead she is ritualistic, organized, and categorized, prone to check lists. “Everything must match.” In short: her art is hardly “interpretive,” instead it is creative in that the idea is novel. She is innovative and unique — smart, but not particularly flexible and her work is certainly not open to interpretation.

Her artistic career, which began at seven after winning a coloring contest, “wasn’t the free, creative aspect, of art, it was being a perfectionist. I loved tracing the lines with the colors I would later use to fill them in. I had control over the entire situation.” Coloring contests segued into linoleum block carvings and a love of math and science, but, ultimately, “I decided art would make me happier.”

Never willing to give up the element of control, Muraczewski embraced painting, but always the abstract variety. “Landscapes and figure painting,” she admits, “were like pulling teeth.” After attending the Maryland Institute College of Art, Muraczewski moved on to Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan for graduate studies, where, she says somewhat sheepishly, “I got kicked in the ass.” The main criticism? “I was making paintings that had been done before, so how could I make them mine?”

It began as vengeance, of sorts. “I was at Cranbrook, which was where the Eames had come from, so I was completely submerged with great design. So, I began to do paintings from Ikea catalogues, of the furniture, but life-sized.”

Her retaliation was painstaking. “All the parts of the furniture had to be calculated by taking tiny measurements and setting up ratio equations to blow them up into real size,” she says. But it was worth it — at last, Muraczewski used the math and science she had loved as a kid in her art. The finished product? Ironically, it was exactly what her instructors’ criticisms had suggested she do: find a niche for herself — something novel, abstract, but entirely her.

Muraczewski’s first art show exhibiting her Ikea paintings took place at the Haus Gallery in Pasadena, which was formerly a home. Still divided into a typical housing floor plan, Muraczewski found a place for everything and put everything in it’s place — organized and structured, putting her living room paintings in the living room, her kitchen paintings in the kitchen, and so on.

It was Muraczewski’s unwillingness to eliminate organization and convention from her “abstract” art that ultimately became her individualism and motivation as an abstract artist.

Muraczewski’s personal stamp came to fruition once she began to create the wooden floors she saw in the catalogues. Once she saw the wood grain she was making, “boy, did I fall in love with it.” It’s the wood grains that have become her signature. Now combined with textile patterns from wallpaper, dishes, clothing, and rugs, Muraczewski feels comfortable and organized “while making my art.”

And so I watch my nephew as he draws at the kitchen table. Half the page is carefully outlined and inside the lines, the other half is a creative menagerie of color swirls all over the page and half-onto the table. Ultimately, I decide he’s finding which type of art is him. Who cares if he’s inside the lines or out?

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To learn more about Christina Muraczewski and her artwork, check out her Web site, ChristinaMuraczewski.com, or 20x200.com.