Tina St. Claire

Biography

Tina St. Claire was a self-taught artist whose easily distinguishable work could be found throughout the city of Los Angeles, sometimes on abandoned structures or alongside graffiti. St. Claire displayed her work in over 100 gallery spaces throughout the U.S. She was also featured in Juxtapoz in 2012.

St. Claire's art often complimented her partner, fiancé and frequent collaborator, Dereck Seltzer. Often shown together, his work leans on the masculine and sharp side of aesthetic while St. Claire's lingers in the darkness but lives in the light, feminine edge of contemporary street culture. Her creations are heavily infused with mysticism and street art style. With a background in wheat pasting and mural-style street art, her design-heavy artistic style, whether on panels, canvas, skateboard decks, or paper, is heavily informed by the street. Most of her pieces surround the female form or face, and a ghostly energy with crystals, skulls, and pupil-less eyes peering into the depths of your soul. With fangs, sharp jaw lines, and a feminine strength that is unmatched, her work stands out from the crowd of other L.A. artists. Together, the collaborative works of Dereck and Tina—or Haunted Euth and TFail is unmistakable and hypnotic.

St. Claire is remembered as an illustrator above all else, but she also worked with high end clients, studios, companies and organizations, and she taught herself a multitude of disciplines in order to be the best artist she could. Her work tends to be multi-disciplinary in her style and technique. She creating thousands of pieces of art in her life time that varied from full paintings, sketches in her moleskin journals, silk screen print editions, numerous legal and illegal street installations, stickers, tapestries, zines, clothing of her designs, and fine art.

Music

St. Claire first picked up a guitar when she was 13. Her inspiration for doing so came from bands such as Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Silverchair. She joined her first real band around 15, and hung around with that band until she was 18. They toured the mid-western U.S., played shows in Hollywood and all over California, but ultimately, it didn’t progress into anything bigger. She left that band and started her own band, called LiaFail in July 2003. With a strong desire for an all girl line-up, and a passionate grouping of musicians including Mikaela Mayer, Nita Strauss, Henry Felkel and Kirsten Schlüter. The band toured the US a few times and played a number of well known clubs, events, and festivals including Warped Tour multiple times in the United States before disbanding (in 2008). It is was through the band that she adopted the name TFAIL — a reference to the band’s namesake.

Lia-Fail wasn’t a “cause” band nor did they shy away from heavy subjects. They’ll address the serious issues of today but not in any way you’ll expect. Their last concern was image and their first concern was having a kick-ass time playing shows and making great music. Playing typically male-dominated types of music was like walking a fine line for them. They were constantly fighting the “chick” stereotypes, but wanted to be watched and valued for their music more than their bodies. They weren’t the typical female band in that they weren’t afraid to bring the pain and heaviness and were not concerned with being “ladies.” These girls just wanted play shows and have a good time doing it, according to a press release from the band back in 2006.

Artwork

TMRWLND (spoken as "Tomorrow Land") is a hardcover book that also exists as a compendium of all three issues of the zine by the same name, made by St. Claire and Seltzer. Established in 2013, TMRWLND morphed from a zine project into a full time creative studio entity and working space. The collaborative zine project and book highlighted the two artists’ individual talents and distinctive individual styles of art and art-making. The artists used techniques such as inking, drawing, silkscreen printing, and hand painting, in TMRWLND.

The artwork of the TMRWLND zines and book showcases this complimentary relationship between TS Claire's and Dereck Seltzer's styles, with imagery that is self-curated to represent their individual bodies of work.

St. Claire created many large scale hand painted pieces that she installed around the city of Los Angeles. The work was instantly recognizable and stylistically unlike anything being done in L.A. at the time. Every piece was drawn, painted and installed by hand. She utilized wheat pasting, graphic design, silk screening, acrylic, spray and enamel painting in her work on the street, and stood out as a force in the L.A. street art scene with her distinctive style. Most of her pieces surround the female form or face, and a ghostly energy; crystals, skulls, pupil-less eyes, peer into the depths of your soul. With fangs, sharp jaw lines, and a feminine strength thats unmatched, her work stands out from the crowd of other L.A. artists.

St. Claire's paintings, drawings, and mixed media works could be spotted a mile away—there weren’t many other artists with such striking style during her hayday. Tina’s work often featured “feminine” color schemes, but with strong and sometimes jarring images of women skulls, symbolism, cats, crystals, and other personally significant imagery to Tina. Her paintings were showed all over the country, and were collected at reasonable prices by people all over the world. Her pieces evoked a kind of inspiring and powerful feeling in their audience. The subjects in most of her paintings and drawings were life forms of some kind, whether animals, animal skulls or women, and they always had empty eyes, full of power and promise, of mysticism and magic. Her online following was enormous, and helped her artwork sales and popularity. Her Tumblr, Instagram, blogspot and other social media sites were constantly flooded with great content, messages, and fantastic original works of art, whether in-progress or completed. Her fiancé Dereck Seltzer curated a memorial exhibit of her last series of work called “Eternal” in April 2016, at the Surf Club Gallery in Hollywood, presented by The Artillerist.

Tina St. Claire and Dereck Seltzer (Haunted Euth) met in October of 2011 and began dating and working together creatively shortly after. The two partnered on murals, installations, pop-up shows and the now internationally published book TMRLWND, despite having very little to almost no backing or support from the contemporary Los Angeles art scene. Over the next five years, their installations and murals could be seen in the Downtown L.A. Arts District, Culver City Arts District and along Sunset Boulevard most frequently. Seltzer proposed to Tina St. Claire shortly before her hospitalization for cancer treatment in 2016. He stayed with her day and night while she resided in the hospital and actively worked to raise money to support her medical bills through a Gofundme Campaign.

Charity

St. Claire devoted countless hours to helping to try and balance the gender and racial inequalities in the art world, both on the street and in the gallery; and she has worked independently to create artwork, imagery and content that represents those who have been marginalized or looked over by society as a whole, bringing awareness and thought to valid current social issues.

St. Claire painted a large mural for Temple Magnet School (LAUSD) for which she received a letter of recognition from the school board and Los Angeles. She also hand-painted numerous skateboard decks for charity which were auctioned off to help the Venice Family Clinic in Los Angeles.

“She believed wholly in the individual’s power to change the world and she did so herself, donating monthly (in secret no less) to charities that supported animal rights, peace, and the idea of equality for people of all color and genders.”

Death and legacy

St. Claire passed away as a result of Gliobastoma Multiforme grade 4 on March 9, 2016 in Los Angeles.

Her recently published book TMRWLND is now available internationally, through Not A Cult publishing. There is a second book of her art in the works, currently untitled, curated and designed by her fiancé Dereck Seltzer. There is currently an "untitled" documentary about her life and art in production with Director Rich Ragsdale at the helm. There is charity being developed as well, in her name, that uses the TMRLWND art that she and Dereck Seltzer created together and gives its profits to Glioblastoma Multiforme research.