Judit Nagy L. | “STELLA”, 2021

Description

Judit Nagy L. was born in Slovakia and started drawing in her childhood. Her kindergarten teacher was the first to recognize her painting skills and acknowledge her talent, and she became a great supporter of her creativity.

Judit earned a master’s degree in civil engineering, built a beautiful family life, and started her own business, but she still felt something was missing. When she was 40 years old, she decided to go on a pilgrimage to the Camino de Santiago. Just like in the film, the 42-day hike on the Way of St. James changed her life forever: she plucked up the courage to pursue her passion and start painting again. Today, she lives and works in Switzerland and has developed her own unique mixed media process: She paints with wine, earth, resonance gouache colors with homeopathic information, real crystals, and pearl and acrylic colors with extremely high pigmentation.

Judit invented her method in 2015 and called it “IVVArt – In Vino Veritas Art Method ©.” Most recently, she received the International Carravagio Art Prize for Grand Masters of Art in Milan. She left in May 2022 to realize her next project in an art residence in Sicily dedicated to volcanic wines.

Judit Nagy L – LNJ tends to create a magic of art with real wine and earth from the vineyards, and she is a pilgrim to Compostela, Spain. The artist tells us that she is not only a painter but a creative person who is guided by inspiration and deeply aware that “painting, like all creative activities, is a tool that leads to self-expression and self-development.” At the same time, “we do not ‘create,’ but rather we are a collaborator in the process of creation that we embody.”  

When she turned 50, a desire grew in her: she wanted her art to have even more to do with the elemental: with people, the earth, relationships, and the diversity of horizontal and reciprocal connections, with the “something” that is difficult or impossible to put into words. As she prepared to travel to Sicily (in May 2022) and begin her art project “Etna and Her Wines” “in vivo” on the island, it became increasingly clear to her that the quest, her search for the essence of the experience of the whole, is to achieve creativity in the nutshell of necessity: to create with lines, surfaces and with colors that beguile (even when used minimally), “highly musical” and always (seemingly) without effort. It deals with questions such as “Can the arts unite and heal? If yes, then how? ”  

Judit is a mixed media painter who paints with real wine and soil samples from vineyards, using her unique IVVArt method © to create portraits (called WINEporTRAIT-s) of selected wines. 

When working on the portraits of spirits (schnapps, brandy, gin, etc.), she uses spices directly from distilleries to create a visual story of high-quality drinks that belong to a piece of art called “Art of the Spirit – Spirit of Art – Art is Spirit.” Judit likes to work with found objects and transform them into high-quality, recyclable artworks, which she calls ReMixArt.  

My artist name is Judit Nagy L. or LNJ, which is my signature that you will find handwritten on all my original works. I added the letter “L.” to my maiden name (which is very common in Central Europe, especially in Hungary) as a tribute to my great-grandfather (Lantody), who originally came from France. I am a kind of human cuvée: I belong to the Hungarian minority from my fatherland, the Slovak Republic, and I have been living permanently in Switzerland since 2015.  

But here’s something I haven’t revealed until now: There’s another reason I added the “L” to my original name: There’s another artist about ten years younger with the same name who lives and works in my old hometown. She signs her work in the same style as I used to. I appreciate her art very much (I am even a collector of her art), so I decided to make this change in my signature to avoid conflicts after some time.  

I am an artist because I was born to be one. Visual creativity is my destiny – it’s that simple. And it is something you feel in the deepest part of your being, with all your body’s cells. My artistic activity is a peacemaking action. I want to spread harmony and draw people’s attention to something beautiful. I want to touch hearts and sometimes evoke questions in the viewer that can lead to open communication between all of us or within ourselves, which is always very important for personal and collective development and positive changes.  

For me, the sale of my works is more than a simple act of trade: I want to give collectors, in addition to a certificate of authenticity, which is an obligatory part of the artwork, the exclusive right to a lifetime of personal pleasure. I wish my art creations to be the ultimate mediator!  

I come from an engineering background, and I consider myself a born artist. I remember very well the first years of my life when I was only four years old: I played in our big garden and built villages out of clay, or I drew and painted, then designed something out of paper, plasticine, in some years later also out of fabric and leather.  

Parallel to high school (we call it Gymnasium with four not-easy years of study), I attended an art school and was mentored by an artist in my hometown in one private studio. I was preparing to study at one of the art universities in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, but some factors in my life influenced me a lot and changed my path. Therefore, a few years later, I graduated as a civil engineer in Yugoslavia (now Serbia). I never really stopped being an artist. While studying at university, I joined a private art studio nearby and participated in group exhibitions. I needed art like you need oxygen.  

But my real comeback happened much later. First, I had to walk the Camino in Spain and find the strength to change many things. The pilgrimage took place in 2011 and was the biggest accelerator to breaking out of the wrong way of life and finding myself again. For me, of course, it meant being able to fully define myself as an artist. To accept and believe in me after so many years of denying the truth and trying to be someone else just to be accepted by the environment. And lo and behold, Here I Am!  

On the Camino, I learned that real wine is not just a simple alcoholic beverage but an art in itself. So it happened that, step by step, I fell in love with the idea “ART meets WINE – WINE is ART” (The slogan of our IVVArt project), and I also met the love of my life, Stefan. Both “projects” needed a lot of faith, will, and trust to bring them under one roof a few years later. Today, we are married, a private couple, and business partners.