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10 Questions // Heidi Zito : Brooklyn

1. What inspires you these days?

So much inspires me, like traveling, falling in love, films, music, creative sciences. These days I’ve been inspired by films by Jean Luc Godard, Chris Cunningham, Gaspard Noe and even just blips of beautiful scenes from a bunch of french new wave films. Over the summer I went traveling around Europe to be inspired by new art, artists like Hurvin Anderson, Alastair Mackinven, John Wynne.

2. Who are your heroes?

Machines. They are perfect.

3. What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Perfect happiness is the moment I step back from a painting to realize that its now a complete work of art.
What once started out as an experiment, something I have not done previously, full of questions and the untrieds. It’s a very brief window of time where all my questions about the composition and meaning have been validated and magically worked out. It is such a calm and peaceful feeling when any ambiguity I may of have had has dissolved. To know exactly what your doing even while you’re still in motion with it. Unfortunately, that perfect moment is very brief, when the vision is clear and the concepts flows well together. It’s a moment I would like to revisit again and again.

4. What scares the hell out of you?

The thought that all my work in life has amounted to nothing.

5. What makes you laugh hard?

Being with my family. They are all such different characters and honest and brutal. Being around them is the only place I can lose myself in an uncontainable state of laughter.

6. Who are your favorite artists of all time?

Alex Kanevsky, Jean Michel Basquiat, J.M.W Turner, Francis Bacon, Charlie Kaufman, Francois Truffoit, Michel Gondry, & Chris Cunningham.

7. What is your guiltiest pleasure?

Standing ten feet back and throwing paint onto a perfectly good painting, ruining it just because I’m bored with the work. New “accidents” sometimes bring in new and exciting problems to solve which help me create a more interesting painting.

8. If you could change one thing about yourself what would it be?

I would like to have more patience.

9. What’s your favorite thing in the world?

The feeling that life is so mysteriously great I could explode….it is the greatest feeling in the world.

10. What comes to mind when you think of Brooklyn?

I just moved to Brooklyn, it is very new and I am happy to be living in it. When I think of Brooklyn, I think of many red bricks, the smell of pavement- it is growing. I think of beginnings of my family. I think of the new generation of artists and its diversity with a strong sense of community. There is so much to explore here, I don’t know where to begin. I want to discover its personality little by little as time goes on.