Artist Lana ‘Crude Things’ Guerra is a living self-portrait | Arts

Lana “Crude Things” Guerra is a painter, printmaker, sculptor, tattooist, noise musician, videographer, hairdresser, fashion designer, dollmaker, puppeteer and – in the past anyway – a circus performer.  

Guerra moved to New Orleans permanently 10 years ago. She’s celebrating with a big show of paintings, prints and sculptures titled “Conjuring Madness” in the Art Conscious gallery on St. Claude Avenue in Arabi. The show is chock-full of strange cartoon animals and macabre people with big teeth and too many eyes. 

Her garish, transient style is a reflection of her past, she said.

In the circus, Guerra was a living marionette. This was back in the early 2000s, when small traveling sideshow-style circuses were a thing — think glass-eaters, sword swallowers and fire dancers. Her body was pierced with sterile hooks and held aloft on cords that were manipulated by a stilt-walking puppeteer, who made her dangle and “move around like a doll.” She said it didn’t hurt. In fact, she said, it was therapeutic.

In 2001, Guerra had her face tattooed as if she were a doll, with an eye patch, a valentine heart and green stripes. It’s a singular look, a little scary, a little sweet. “I don’t like wearing makeup, so my makeup is permanent,” she explained.

And, she said, she was part of an experimental music ensemble that slipped into New Orleans on the Halloween after Katrina. The nightclub where the show was supposed to take place was closed, she said. But she and the others made the best of it. They stayed in a bohemian boarding house, she recalled, attended a voodoo ceremony, slept in a graveyard, and did all the things you’d expect experimental musicians to do.

 A crazy life

Guerra said that she lived in 15 states by the time she was 12 years old. Her late mom was in the Air Force, she said, and she was also mentally ill, maybe schizophrenic. Guerra spent her childhood in women’s shelters, short-term rentals and even on the street. She said she can recall hanging around highway rest stops from California to Florida, while her mother held up a sign soliciting handouts. She said she didn’t meet her father until she was in her 30s.

“I literally had a crazy life,” she said.

Sometime in the 1980s, she found herself in Canada, where she beheld a spectacular young woman, wearing a leather jacket bristling with spikes. Her cheeks were pierced with safety pins and her hair was sharpened into a blue Mohawk. “It made an impression,” Guerra said.

“I said, “Oh my God, I want to be a girl who looks like that.” Aesthetically speaking, she would be a punk forever.

Simple messy faces

Guerra’s travels finally ended when her great aunt and uncle took her into their home in Providence Rhode Island and provided a level of stability she’d never known. Guerra may not have had much of an education up to that point, but she said she was smart and eager. She made the high school honor roll. But – probably because of her hand-to-mouth upbringing – she already worried how she’d make a living.

Hairdressing was the answer. She had a flair and soon enough she had clients. She had a trade that she could practice anywhere. For a time she attended Boston University, where she studied painting on a scholarship. She had the skills to draw realistically, she said, but traditional technique made her impatient.

“It took all these steps to make a painting,” she recalled. Then as now, Guerra craved directness.

And what was more direct than graffiti? Guerra said she remembers as a little girl traveling through Manhattan and marveling at the explosion of aerosol painting that was taking place in the ’70s. She said she tried her hand at tagging, though she produced “simple, messy faces” instead of a stylized signature.

Becoming Crude Things

Guerra used the tools and techniques of graffiti to produce the strange, upbeat murals she’s contributed along St. Claude Avenue over the past years. She said she’s never been interested in vandalizing property and paints in places that are already well-known street art territory. Ideally, she said, her public art is a welcome distraction. “I like to get people out of their heads,” she said.

In her paintings, everything is an eternal work in progress. She’s never quite done. Guerra said she sometimes paints and repaints a canvas 50 times. There are layers upon layers upon layers. 

Years ago, Guerra made a coarsely sewn doll for a friend, who described it as a crude thing. Thus, her nom de art was born.

Tyler Van Dyke, a street art authority who operates NOLA Art Walk tours, said that he’s known Guerra for seven years, and has even hosted spray-painting classes that she led. Guerra’s art, he said, “has a nice mix of childlike wonder and creepy, Gothic aesthetics – what they call art brut.”

“I think this city works as a mirror to what she represents,” Van Dyke said, “the morose, sinister aspects and the whimsey. It’s a match made in heaven.”

The street artist known as Swan said it’s tough to characterize Guerra’s style. “I mean, it’s just like dark, abstract, with bright color, cute, great, mischievous, evil, childlike, expressionistic.”

Asked why she thought Guerra chose to settle in the Crescent City, Swan said it was simple. “There’s no other place in the world to live.”  

Guerra said she may seem eccentric, but these days she leads the life of an energetic entrepreneur, getting up early and working until she drops.

In a way, she’s a living self-portrait, self-made and self-aware. “I think every artist paints self-portraits whether they know it or not,” she said. And everyone is “putting their whole life on a painting.”

“I am my art. I live my art,” she said.

Conjuring Madness continues through Oct. 25 at Art Conscious gallery, 6601 St. Claude Ave. Guerra also plans a shockingly spooky puppet show at the Mudlark Theater, 1200 Port St., on Oct. 30.