Alligator Lizards online

Come join me for some Creative Integration on February 1st

I have been teaching my class, Alligator Lizards for the last 2 years in person at the Alembic in Berkeley. I have been wanting to offer an online version to you and friends online for a long time now and I am so happy to announce that it’s happening!

As a refresher, Alligator Lizards is a method of interacting with visionary, dream, meditative, and unconscious material and experiences in an Animist and Jungian way. That means that I treat these experiences as allies and members of our internal council of advisors, not just something that needs to be assimilated into our personality. Instead of making a pureed soup, I see peak experience material as essential ingredients to our personality stew, where carrots, potatoes, and meat are recognizable as to what they are and add to the incredible multisensory person that we all are.

Each Alligator Lizards class teaches a different technique to get into dialogue with these experiences. Below is yesterday’s beautiful collection of images. Once we dropped in with a guided meditation to call up an aspect of their visionary experience, I asked everyone to envision a better world, their own personal Utopia with the help of the experience that they were there to work with. The vibrance and beauty of their visions was just breathtaking and as you can see in the beautiful creations below, the variation in each of the ways of expression is as unique as each individual who created them. THERE IS NO REQUIREMENTS FOR BEING AN ARTIST TO DO THIS PRACTICE. This is about giving yourself permission to create and play.

We have done many different techniques over the months I have taught this class - from automatic writing and drawing, as you see below, to surrealist techniques such as my favorite, decalcomania; we’ve used tarot in a variety of different ways as well as mirror portraits and portraits of each other in class.

For the class on February 1st, we are going to be using another favorite technique of mine, fumage. This is accomplished by holding a piece of paper over a flame and moving it around. the soot in the flame creates an image that we can mine for creative inspiration, symbols, and messages that the experience we are working with wants us to know.

You can see below how you can get an extremely evocative image that begins to speak as soon as you look at it.

• WHAT YOU WILL NEED FOR CLASS: 1 candle. this should preferably be large than a tea light and you need clear access to the flame, so candles where the wick is down below the glass won’t work. A stick candle or new pillar candle work best.

  • Thick paper - multi-media or watercolor paper is best, at least 8.5” x 11” in size. I love working with the 9” x 12” paper size personally.

  • Markers, pens, colored pencils, a variety of art-making utensils and materials

TO REGISTER: This class is a sliding scale of $5 - $20. Please send me the amount you are able to pay to my Venmo @KrisztinaLazar. In the note please indicate it is for Alligator Lizards (an alligator emoji works fine too) and your email and then I will email out the Zoom link the day before the class.

You are registered automatically if you are a paying subscriber to my Substack. I will include your email when I send out the link.

I will be teaching this class as part of a Vision Train offering. What is the Vision Train you ask? It was a Zoom call started the eve of lockdowns back in 2020 by the amazing Amanda Sage. It literally ran 24 hours nonstop - as in the zoom room never was dark - for a year. It is still going strong today as an incredible community of artists from around the world with communal offerings of all kinds. Check out the website by clicking here and their socials for more information if you are interested in hopping on board. For those familiar with the Vision Train, this will not be on the regular zoom “track” but on a different one that I will email you once you register.

I am looking forward to seeing you there!!