A BRIGHT FUTURE
Self-taught Russian painter Lora Zombie uses colourful animals and children as inspiration,
“I’m just a happy chicken,” says selftaught Russian “grunge artist” Lora Zombie, 25.
Born Larisa Novik, Zombie is making her name with colourful, popculture-influenced acrylic paintings that feature kids, animals and the occasional rocker or cartoon character. She blends incongruous images to get paintings that depict things such as a child embracing a skull, Spider-Man in a tutu or Little Red Riding Hood pulling a machine gun from Grandma’s basket of goodies as the wolf approaches.
Zombie lives in St. Petersburg, but was in Toronto briefly recently to display 60 new works at a show titled Unicorn Comet.
She has bypassed the gallery system, growing her audience through daily postings of her art on social media, explains Tom Rowlandson of Montreal online retailer Eyes on Walls, which sells Zombie’s work. She’s also launched an apparel and accessories line, Herotime.
Zombie loves colour, as well as makeup and clothes, and you’re just as likely to find her hanging out at Sephora as an art-supply store, she says with a laugh. She’s instantly recognizable by her electric blue hair — it’s her favourite colour, not her trademark, Zombie points out.
Although she sells most of her art online, Zombie pops in at galleries for one-day shows or art performances. She sold a piece to Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul at her 2011 Toronto show. Blake Lively and Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz also own her work.
She started as a kid “I always painted. I was missing school because I wanted to paint. I was painting all the time,” Zombie explains, adding she had a lot of pets as a youngster and used them as her subjects, later adding cartoon characters. Her prolific nature continues. Zombie paints daily.
The Gorillaz are her muse “It was a super-huge inspiration,” Zombie says of the English virtual band, especially its co-founder, comics artist/designer Jamie Hewlett. At 15, she started making fan art and dreamed of working for Zombie Flesh Eaters, the animation studio behind the Gorillaz. “I wanted to work for the studio but I was like a fun girl . . . and they weren’t able to see me as a serious person,” she says with a shrug. As a tribute, she started signing her work Lora Zombie. “I really love music and I feel like I wish to be a musician, but I don’t have musical talent at all, so this Gorillaz project was a nice way of expression for me. I like art and music.” Social media star “It wasn’t my plan. It’s just something that comes naturally for me,” Zombie explains. Her daily posts helped her build a following quickly. Her Facebook page has 228,000 likes. “She’s got a highly engaged audience,” Rowlandson said. “She just posts naturally to social media. She’s really good at creating content and that’s what makes social media work.”
Animals and kids “I love animals, and I love children because animals and children are super-honest,” Zombie says, adding she likes to use them in her works because “they are the purest things.”
“Kids are innocent, but they can be super violent and when they’re violent . . . it’s the same way because they are super pure. Kids’ violence is pure violence, and kids’ kindness is pure kindness.”
And unicorns Zombie can’t explain why she loves unicorns, but they show up frequently in her art. She’s also wearing a unicorn necklace. Her passion for them grew out of a piece she painted “many years ago” called Drugs and Unicorns, depicting a “super bad-feeling girl” with the mythical beast saying: “You don’t need to use drugs to see me.”
“Think about drugs. Some people think if they will use drugs, they will have a talent and a fantasy to make something,” says Zombie, explaining that the painting reinforces the idea that “you can use your fantasy without any drugs.
“I am super-straight edge. I don’t use alcohol, nothing that spoils people,” Zombie adds.
Next steps Zombie wants to do short films blending cells of her art into animation “with a whale in the sky and all kinds of stuff.”
Rowlandson says she has a show at the Saatchi Gallery in London next year and has been invited to exhibit at Art Basel in 2016.