10 Questions with Dolores Mephistopheles

Dolores Mephistopheles is an artist born in Zagreb. After obtaining a master's degree in museology and educational informatics in Zagreb and trying different career paths, she decided to follow her childhood dream and pursue painting.
She is currently based in Berlin, Germany.

doloresmephistopheles.com | @dolores_mephistopheles

Dolores Mephistopheles portrait | Photo by Branko Paulinich

ARTIST STATEMENT

Dolores Mephistopheles combines energy work with painting and finds a lot of inspiration in the shadow aspects of human existence. She uses her whole body as a tool besides painting with brushes to express ideas and release or transform energies.

Her paintings are a direct extraction and markings of her life experiences, with a story behind each of them. Mainly inspired by life lessons and painted with only red, blue, black, and white, almost every work shows an aspect of a human relationship with oneself and others. The four selected colors were important on her journey of looking for freedom from limitations, found primarily in the Berlin techno scene, which influenced her work. With neon colors and black light, some paintings show the hidden meanings and emotions invisible under normal light, offering more than one perspective to the viewers.

Dolores Mephistopheles | Photo by Lav Peripovic

INTERVIEW

First of all, tell our readers a bit about you. Who are you, and how did you start experimenting with images?

I was born in Zagreb, Croatia. Before I moved to Berlin in 2016, I spent most of my life living in and around Zagreb, where I earned a master's degree in museology and heritage management together with educational informatics at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. I tried different career paths, both related and unrelated to my studies, which were supposed to be good for me but didn't match my soul. As a child, I wanted to be a painter. Still, I've been taught through life that working for money and fulfilling social expectations is more important than being true to yourself, which carries social consequences needed to be avoided. That said, the creative part of me has been fairly suppressed for a long time. My need for painting has been tight to a "home feeling", so I started painting only after I started living alone in my home and made space for it. Once I started, I felt with every part of me that it is exactly what I'm supposed to do for the time being. Sometime before that, I started energy healing, and combining one with another happened to be what I'm doing now.

What is your aim as an artist?

Well, shortly, I could say it like this: there are so many cultural and social norms, expectations, commercial creations, etc. in this world established and designed to keep us away from ourselves, to numb ourselves, and to make us go through time distracted from the lack of intimacy with fragmented parts of ourselves. It can be tough to keep in touch with oneself and own it while being constantly bombarded with things fed with our time and energy - energy in the form of attention and money. At the same time, on the other side, perhaps nobody even taught us how to truly get in touch with ourselves in the first place. And that is just a fragment of possible reasons why humans are disconnected from themselves. As the process of creating my paintings has the power to make me recognize and connect with parts of myself I previously have not been connected to, I believe my paintings can help some viewers identify and connect with their aspects of themselves. They show that it is a part of the human experience to still feel like a human, even if we're instructed not to feel and think in a certain way. My aim as an artist above all is to keep my whole self open for creating.

Jealousy for attention, Black light, Acrylics on paper, 131,5 cm x 98 cm, 2021 © Dolores Mephistopheles

What do you do when you realise that there is much more than you thought there is, Black light, Acrylics on paper, 69 cm x 98 cm, 2021 © Dolores Mephistopheles

Can you tell us about the process of creating your work? What aspect of your work do you pay particular attention to?

When I have the energy to express, release or transform, I use my whole body as a tool where I paint my body according to how I feel and what I need to express. For some paintings, I also use my hair, tears, and blood. Sometimes I create a ceremony that includes meditation, intention, plant medicine, music, or total silence. Otherwise, I express myself like most of the other painters by using brushes. For some paintings, I use neon acrylics and black light. The idea comes from clubbing and meditation, where to see some things more clearly, you need to either see them in the dark or close your eyes. What I pay attention to is that I create out of feeling, not out of thinking. If I get an idea or a force to paint, I try to do it as it is still fresh and present. I try not to leave it for later and think about it too much because then it loses its power. It doesn't work like it with every painting, of course, but I pay attention to giving each painting what it needs: some need patience and slow work, and some are more impulsive. It is important for me to have a connection and attune to each of them.

Let's talk about your color palette. You have recurring colors in your work. How did you choose them, and what do they represent for you?

Red and blue are my power colors. I simply noticed that people tend to respect my personal space more if I wear those colors rather than when I'm in black as usual. Red and blue are also the colors I've always been assigning to my parents as a child, based on their overall energy, and later on, I saw my feminine as red and masculine as blue. White is the color I assign to the light spirit, and black is all the darkness that makes balance with the light. These are the meanings I have for the colors, but they can take completely different meanings in my paintings. Somehow, since I started, I didn't need to use any other color than those four. That doesn't mean my world contains only these four colors; I do not exclude the possibility that in some future phase of creating, I use other colors too.

Where do you draw inspiration from for your work? Do you have any specific references?

From living. I could point out music, energy dynamics, or behavioral patterns, but simply living life, learning from it, going through changes, transformations and embracing the dark side of things is for me an inspiration itself, and as such, it is so far a never-ending source of it. Most of my paintings are referring to aspects of intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships, but triggers for creations can come simply from anywhere.

What is your favorite experience as an artist so far?

Entering and being in the state of flow, where on the way of creating one single painting, I end up creating multiple. That makes me feel very much alive.

You are currently based in Berlin. What do you think about the art community and market there? And how do you cultivate a collector base?

The pandemic affected the art community so much that my initial plans of working offline and staying away from social media fell apart right from the start. If I wanted to use my time, I had to adapt to the situation and show my work online. Unfortunately, until writing this, I had no chance to fully experience the art community and market in the offline world. On the more positive side, because of the growing online connectivity and alternatives that came out of the pandemic, so far, it was easier to connect with galleries and people from around the globe than with local ones.

What are you working on now, and what are your plans for the future? Anything exciting you can tell us about?

Currently, I work on several different paintings, and recently, I started working on portraying the simplicity of human beings. In the future, I hope to include other people in my painting processes too. But speaking of other plans, I can only reveal more when the time comes.

All the sex we didn’t have, Black light, Acrylics on paper, 141,5 cm x 98 cm, 2020 © Dolores Mephistopheles

What is one lesson you learned from this past year's experience? And how did it help you further develop your art?

I learned to face my fears, no matter how real or irrational they are. Even now, one year later, when I look back and see what I have done and gone through to make my dream a reality, it is still scary. But I'm glad I did it and am still doing it. Discovering and facing fears was not just helpful but absolutely necessary, not just in painting but also in the other aspects of work and life.

Finally, share something you would like the world to know about you?

I like watching sunsets.

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