I was born in Brussels and was raised and lived there until I was 18 when I went off to India. Brussels is not unlike any other city except that it is filled with the influence of Flemish art (and chocolate and waffles): Breughel, Hieronymous Bosch and Hans Memling (particularly 'the last judgement') whose works are still too radical to be fully embraced by society as a whole-the theatre of the damned and the saved/the theatre of dreams/death/pleasantries and corruption. Particularly Breughel and Bosch are high art cartoonists-cartoons can make anything serious seem trivial but to operate as a cartoonist with refined technique: then you have to take the theatre of the subject seriously, and you have to think about it and these painters were cartoonists, poets and the best of technicians. So that is my background in Brussels by and large in so far as art is concerned.

I got in to painting before talking or writing. I used to paint with spaghetti. Writing was an abhorrence and a nuisance that distracted me from my preferred medium of communication: pictures. It developed on and off but got more serious at say 13, 14 when I first forced myself to draw from paintings, photographs and also album covers/posters: any interesting beautiful image with more than what meets the eye in terms of meaning, technique and intention. It has always run parallel to music and both have informed each other.

My main motivations are entirely spiritual in a completely serious sense (spiritual is not a pop art word). It is that element of consciousness that seeks to understand the world from its own perspective and so disregards everything except its own eye. Such as the body is the body but it is the spirit that seeks to understand and it is the spirit that seeks to communicate.

I am associated with Greenpoint in so far as I have lived here on and off for several months and now live here with my girlfriend in an apartment a block from Manhattan ave. I like (..love!) the water front and the industrial buildings, I like the haunted house and I like that everyone speaks polish as it reminds me of home and of old Europe. I like the shingled houses. It betrays the fact that this is a seafaring neighbourhood.

My long term goals are to be a complete human. I don't give a damn about art. I want to be a complete human with the dignity that spits on advertising, the atomisation of the self or any sort of thing that can rob me or you of each other, at least the full knowledge as such. Let's straighten out needs from wants from addictions. This extends itself to a respect of Rimbaud abandoning poetry- it is not enough to know and to show, it also has to be lived and experienced from many sides. No, my long term goals are beyond me.

To expand on my mention of folklore in my work is that it is always going to be a story about more than what is front of you-it's going to be a moment in a greater narrative: the hair from a mane of a horse on the run. From what? A spook in the forest? A woman in white by the spine of a tree? It'll have context. The bible is folklore to me: the story of a people. Blues music is folklore to me and so is folk music. Folklore to me is that: the story of people's dreams, their struggles, their hopes, the symbols and dreams-and their experience. It's no bullish shit. A tree properly seen can stand for all trees. My message to humanity is: watch out! Look carefully cus it's never going to happen again.

https://greenpointers.com/2016/03/24/thursday-spotlight-artist-lewis-lazar/