ART
H A B E N S C o n t e m p o r a r y
A r t
R e v i e w
RAY PISCOPO AGNES DURBET-GIONO NANCY CALEF MARIA BORDEANU MELPOMENI GAGANELI CHITRA RAMANATHAN ANNA TERESHINA SOUMISHA DAUTHEL MARTYNA MATUSIAK
ART
ART H A B E N S
C o n t e m p o r a r y
A r t
R e v i e w
Agnes Durbet-Giono
Nancy Calef
Maria Bordeanu
Ray Piscopo
Anna Tereshina
Martyna Matusiak
France
USA
Romania
Malta
Russia / Switzerland
USA
My work for the past 10 years displays a strong preference for realistic images that range from fashion and film to artificial landscapes and painted interiors. It all began with several paintings inspired by neoclassical artists, which I reinterpreted as fragments with the help of digital processing. Recent works are inspired by personal photographs that help me construct a story, always considering the painted result while I document a scene.
I am interested in motion, movement, colour, vibrancy and order. In life I express myself by creating order and rationality in my world. Having studied engineering, the discipline that it has imparted has moulded my outlook on life in a linear and regimented structure. My experience has been therefore a series of events in pigeon holes or compartments, so I endeavour to break established rules and boundaries in my work by being non-conformist.
Anna describes her artistic style as an intuitive abstract painting, based on her visual experience, gathered together from every day life, travel impressions, her knowledge about composition and color combining. Her main source of inspiration is a natural world, as well as the process of human eye's perception of colors in different light situations. Anna's work combines different mediums and techniques, she works mostly on canvas and paper, using acrylics, watercolor.
Concepts of fear and control appear in every aspect of life as ordinary events or dull everyday actions.
Sensing the presence while creating in a world haunted by masculinity and virility and after taking pictures of sewages treatment plants, water filtrations system, factories, she overimposes their silhouettes. Using two contrasting images to question the overrated perception of what society see as beautiful and ugly, the artist aims to balance feminine and masculinity, writing the love letter in every picture. I use all mediums to translate a feeling and vision.
For many decades I’ve been creating “Peoplescapes,� oil, sculptured characters and applied objects on canvas,addressing cultural, political and spiritual issues facing society. Everyday, I take the brush to canvas and, although I am confronted with fear and insecurity, I also tap into a limitless source of imagery. In those moments, time falls away and it seems that the work creates itself.
My work addresses seemingly contradictory positions and where emotional extremes meet in the mundane middle. Matching the polarities of safety/danger and comfort/misery, questions their stark opposition.I work in diverse media. I combine print based work with drawings and image transfer.
In this issue
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Soumisha Dauthel
Martyna Matusiak Nancy Calef
Melpomeni Gaganeli Chitra Ramanathan
Melpomeni Gaganeli
France
India / USA
Greece
I am a woman painter who lives in Paris and have been painting since the nineties. For a long time I approached my work as a researcher conducting experiments. And finally, I feel like saying that painting is first about moments of life, and moments of my life. Through a conceptual approach, I highlight in a formal way moments of painting (cutouts taken from my own paintings) applied on a flat surface.
To visually portray happiness, I regularly employ intense colors that incorporate a variety of texture materials that are combined with the paint to create effects that extend beyond their two-dimensional surfaces. Painted with rapid brush strokes in an intuitive manner, my paintings are typically large in scale as I intend for the imagery to imagine continuity that dissipates at the edge of the canvases that have the painting continued on their sides.
My videos is usually associated with the contemporary self and the digital personality through its socialpolitical reaction at today’s precarious and polarized era. I am trying to observe not only my various bizarre selfs. Technology can easily create multi faced, anxious and problematic identities. I am especially focused in this fact, as a distinctive and powerful shift in global culture and in contemporary’s integral ‘native’ circumstance of everyday life.
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Chitra Ramanathan
Soumisha Dauthel
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Maria Bordeanu Agnes Durbet-Giono
Anna Tereshina
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Special thanks to: Charlotte Seeges, Martin Gantman, Krzysztof Kaczmar, Tracey Snelling, Nicolas Vionnet, Genevieve Favre Petroff, Christopher Marsh, Adam Popli, Marilyn Wylder, Marya Vyrra, Gemma Pepper, Maria Osuna, Hannah Hiaseen and Scarlett Bowman, Yelena York Tonoyan, Edgar Askelovic, Kelsey Sheaffer and Robert Gschwantner.
On the cover:
It’s Not What You think It Is 80cm x 90cm oils on canvas
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video, 2013
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Special Issue 100cm x 70cm acrylics on canvas Man at Versailles
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An interview by and
, curator curator
Hello Ray and welcome to ART Habens. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. Along with your studies and your profession as an engineer, you always nurtured your passion in Art with lots of master class session by renowned master in Europe: how did these formative experiences influence your evolution as an artist? In particular, how does your cultural substratum due to your career as an engineer direct the trajectory of your current artistic research? Hello and thank you for this opportunity to be featured in your illustrious ART Habens. My first impulses in art take me back to the early 1970s when at secondary school I was taught by none other than one of Malta’s leading painters Antoine Camilleri. For a number of years I continued sketching and painting in water-colours and although I had studied various techniques under Maltese artists Anton Calleja (life classes/human form for 3 years), with ceramist George Muscat and with the Italian mosaicist Luciana Notturni of Ravenna, my talents have been largely self-nurtured through trial-and -error. I found it necessary to supplement my knowledge by attending master classes in Salzburg (Hallein) with Hubert Scheibl and in Venice with Amadou Sow /Sergej Klinkov in 2019 and 2010 respectively. Before I attended the classes with master artist Hubert Scheibl I was already using the scraping technique on my canvasses and when I attended his classes I felt very much at home and considered it a great advantage and honour for me being directed by this master.The following year with Senegalese master artist Sou (passed away in
Ray Piscopo
2015) and Klinkov, I started to include motifs, symbols and cartouches in my works of the time. I started the engineering course in 1973, graduating in 1976, yet I still continued painting during the course and all through my engineering career till changeover to being a full-time artist about 8 years ago. As I had stated in my artist’s statement, in life I express myself by creating order and rationality in my world. Engineering is a discipline that has to a greater extent moulded my outlook on life in a linear and regimented
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In the Pits
60cm x 100cm oils on canvas
structure, like putting everything in compartments. Abhorring the rigidity it imparted to my art, I endeavoured to break established rules and boundaries by being non-conformist as I was convinced that total adherence to entrenched
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ideas only creates clinical art. I believe that there is enough proof that art and science, as much as science and religion, can inhabit within the same cocoon of involvement. I am here reminded of the words by the famed French academician AndrĂŠ
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predisposed to serve both fields of activity. We have appreciated the way the results of your artistic inquiry reflects the balanced connection between beauty and truth: we would like to invite our readers to visit http://www.raypiscopo.com in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production: when walking our readers through your usual setup and process, we would like to ask you if you think that there is a central idea that connects all of your work as an artist. My works are bold excursions into the unknown. I can perhaps define my artistic journey as being eschatological in nature, where one undergoes a myriad of experiences in life only to come out stronger and more pure leading to the divine. Life consists of many deaths, and with each death there is a rebirth. Humanity goes through this never ending cycle and I try to celebrate life with each painting I do. It is therefore no secret that humanity and the related qualities of the human being (love, compassion, beauty, fragility, benevolence, etc.) are the central theme around which my art rotates. Art is the human soul, its spirit, its vision, its concept. It is like looking from the Labyrinth out, I see a bright white....like when one sees the light at the end of the tunnel. My life experiences have made me bold and daring. In all this I may be perceived to be someone craving to transcend the outer layer of things. Every image I am presenting, whichever its specific subject, assumes the character of that object. A person resembles an object, and an object evokes a photograph. Being creative and morally oriented, I depart from the observation of a common ‘average object’, and go on delving into it until I reach the level beyond which there is nothing, or at least there is presumably no alternative entrance leading to it. Here is the key theme, and through it each painting that seems to be ‘locked’ can be opened. My works are not faithful depictions of the outer world of objects. They are no reproduction of visual
Frossard who stated that the more one progresses in the exploration of the physical world (scientific investigation) the more the mystery (hence philosophical interpretation which ultimately leads to religious awareness) increases. Few are
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experience. They somehow look like X-Rays, the ultimate layer underneath the skin, the subtle document of a condition meant to be the final one, the edge, the impenetrable wall beyond which the traveller finds himself at the cross roads, the all or nothingness. In other words I seek to penetrate the outer shell, hopefully to discover meaningfulness.. The body of works that we have selected for this special edition of ART Habens and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article, has at once captured our attention for the way you sapiently deconstruct the artworks of the old masters in order to create such a captivating personal aesthetics: how do you consider the relationship between the heritage from Tradition and contemporary sensitiveness? My infatuation with great works of master artists, whatever the time period and, which at best remain unappreciated and only classified as priceless or taboo, compels and impels me to translate and interpret them through my present feeling onto an empty canvas. I project the masters in a modern idiom demonstarting that their art will live forever and relived through my interpretation for all time. The deconstruction and reconstruction takes place in stages. I look deeper, finding or creating nuances to what there is and create a visible effect that make them stand out as if going out into the 3rd dimension. The contrast I create may be subtle or forceful in quality depending on my mood. This frees me from the straightjacket of dogma or infallible creeds. The underlying meaning and settings are however retained allowing the painting to live on for years to come. This is perhaps how other artists like Picasso (Las Meninas, Women of Algiers..) , Yan Pei Ming (Pope Innocent , Marat, Pape Franco..) -both favourites of mine- and others ‘see’ the masters too.
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No Holds Barred 90cm x 780cm acrylics on canvas 21 4 11
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The fall of Icarus 100cm x 160cm oils on canvas
Breaking Free 90cm x 70cm acrylics on canvas
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feel (now as I am answering this question) that I was reborn 9 years ago when I re-interpreted Caravaggio’s Creation (Adam and God). For me it was a point of no return. The tones were subdued and not as saturated but then I became bold in consonance with my character facing adversity and my palette exploded in full colour. In a way the colours spoke up for me, more than my voice could deliver. I lost my voice in 2001 and I found that art was my best medium for communicating. I try to use hues around the primaries but then I create contrast by placing complimentaries to make them pronounced. To create textures I use different techniques depending oin whether I am using acrylics or oils. With acrylics I use a variety of methods including sputtering and stippling. I also interplay with the placing of colour patches in a random manner. With oils I cannot use sputtering so i have to gradate the layers.
They create works after the masters as they are personally touched by them. Your colors are often bold and saturated, however, we have appreciated the vibrancy of thoughtful nuances of your canvas, and we like the way It's Not What You Think It Is and Versailles show that vivacious tones are not strictly indespensable to create tension and dynamics. How did you come about settling on your color palette? And how does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in an artwork and in particular, how do you develop a texture? Perhaps I should first start to explain my ‘philosopy’ when I create art. I like to use the word create, as distinct from ‘to do’, as for all intents and purposes I am giving substance to something residing in my mind and heart. And much like the Creator, after I complete a painting, I sit in front of the completed painting looking at it for hours, listening to music and sipping wine, till I am completely satisfied that the creation was good. Only then I will sign the painting and say ‘a new life is born’. If one is familiar with my paintings one may see ample white and black patches of colour dispersed around the canvas, supplemented around by all the other colours. For me the white and the black represent the extremes in life: birth and death, light and darkness, good and bad, health and sickness, joy and sadness and so on. But in between, all the other life situations take on different colours depending what is actually happening. That is my main palette. In retrospect I believe this is something deriving automatically from my first paintings, being in bi-chromatic colours, predominantly red and black. Here the contrast created the tension.
The subdued palette in my painting It's Not What You Think It Is is explainable because it was painted during the period I was working on the ‘social issues’ project, and at the time my spirit was likewise subdued. The project was affecting my usually bubbly disposition and this painting was the last I created in the series. In the painting The Man at Versailles the applied colours were chosen to fit the setting of the subject. I have used simlar colours when I painted sculptures (for example Gangesdetail from the Fontana dei 4 Fiumi fountain at Piazza Navona). As you have remarked in your artist's statement, each brush stroke has meaning and purpose and we really like the way your paintings walk the viewers to such excursions into the unknown: into an hybrid dimension where the relationship between the real and the perceived is continuosly challenged, providing the spectatorship with a multilayered visual experience and challenging their perceptual parameters: how important is for you to invite the
When Picasso was reborn with his Demoiselles D’Avignon giving rise to a new genre of paintings, I
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Exhibits at The Old Mill, Lija, Malta - 2019
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allegories than having to be explicit about what you wish to convey.The effect could even be more interesting if one detects the alternative narrative of the image. My Thinker, after Rodin, is a powerful image which evokes an intense and overpowering disposition both in terms of tones used and the viewing angle of the darkish image with big strong hands. When I look at this painting, I am awed by depth of power it transmits.
viewers to elaborate personal meaning? And in particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? It is extremely important for me that the viewer engages with my paintings because it is there that he can find ‘me’. Although my works are realistic, they are not always faithful depictions of the outer world of objects. Beneath the outer surface layer and beyond the appearance of figures and forms of diverse nature, human and non-human, there is always me in search of something. I want the viewer seeing the forms to interrogate them much as I do in terms of their ‘why’ and ‘what for’. In this confrontation with my paintings one can perhaps detect the inner conflicts which I meet with in this Labyrinth. I feel the need to visually document my inner experiences. That is why I invite viewers to dig deep beneath the surface, and view my art work directed towards a layer transcending whatever is visual. I want the viewer to share through my art the process of searching and finding, of dying and then being born again. For me art demands moral justification, and is not in any way an end in itself. My art disproves the idea of art pour l’art. The purpose of art is not art, but the discovery of meaning, ultimate, final, obtained through the depiction of objects with a ‘pen’ which records and interprets.
My New Sneakers, is still symbolically charged by depicting a girl from an Eastern culture robed in her traditional dress and being captivated by new sneakers given to her. One can immediately see the visual contrast but more than anything else, I see a rich culture (symbolised by the eastern robe) tainted by something alien to the culture in the form of a mismatched shoe. Extending the thought further one can apply the message of cultures losing their identity to contemporary influences and intrusions with the excuse of wanting to be cosmopiltan or inter-cultural. Allegories are best used to convey a deeper moral or spiritual meaning without the need to be explicit. My painting Breaking Free also falls into this category and portrays the release from inhibitions that has captivated and perhaps oppressed the subject. One can paint hundreds of images to convey the same intent but an extended metaphor can do just as well if not better as it engages the mind in the process.
Rich of metaphorical aspects, the contrast of tones that we can recognize in My Thinker and in My New Sneakers reflects the extremes one finds in life: how important is for you to create allegorical artworks? And how do you consider the role of symbolically charged images playing within your work?
Your artworks are carefully composed and you often merge surrealistic patterns with human figures, to create such a coherent combination between intuition and rigorous aesthetics: do you conceive you works instinctively or do you methodically elaborate your pieces? In particular, how importance does spontaneity play in your workflow?
Creating allegorical artworks is one way to communicate ideas, thoughts, situations that better be left for others to interpret. Sometimes the intended message is understood better through
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The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus 100cm x 90cm acrylics on canvas
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Il Lupo di Gubbio 100cm x 90cm acrylics on canvas
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age, including topics belonging to personal sphere as domestic violence, inhibition, child labour, mental health, homelessness, as well as political themes as oppression, wars and conflicts and migration. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once remarked that "artists's role differs depending on which part of the world they’re in. It depends on the political system they are living under": does your artistic research respond to a particular cultural moment? How do you consider the role of artists to tackle sensitive cultural and religious issues in order to trigger social change in our globalised contemporary age?
Planning is very important to me. As with life, one plans ahead one way but then one has to react to new ‘inspiring arrows’ along the way of developing the art piece. I define my art as abstracted realism with expressionistic executions. I am not the right person to assign labels to my art and I leave the experts to that but this is how I interpret my style of work. I love human forms and these are central to most of my art works. But then the human undergoes through life’s many and varied experiences and this makes life interesting in so many ways. I try to bring in elements from other time periods in my works and try to create movement and tension as if extraneous elements are engaging with the person, leading to various outcomes. Qualifying my comments to my mainstream genre of paintings, all spontaniety is embedded in the process, as it may come in the form of shapes and visual elements or it may come about through the application of colours or brushstrokes. Experience in painting and the developing aesthetic guide me to place a mark in a particular place and not in another place. It is a coherent process all along but I allow freedom to take over and insert whatever I feel necessary to make the outcome ‘whole’. Spontaniety is only allowed as long as the painting is coming though the way I want it to. I do not like leaving things to chance, even though risk taking has its own rewards. That is how intuition and rigorous aesthetics work with me. It is unlike Gutai where a mere impulse makes you place a mark on the medium. My actions are perhaps more calculated even though I am quite able to paint spontaneously (Gutai 1, Gutai 2 and others), with explosive gestures or uncontrolled movements of the brush. I think of myself as being a versatile and prolific artist and I guess that the type of art pieces I create depend on my mood at the time.
I consider myself to be a somewhat sensitive person and alert to everything that goes on around me. It may be because I have been close to three personal near death experiences that make me instinctively trigger into action as soon as I sense something is not going right. It may also be because I was thought to love others as I love myself. The vast pyroclastic wave in the use of social media around the globe has been largely beneficial to reveal such issues of what I term ‘institutionalised poverty’: being the deprivation of something which lowers the quality of life of a person or animal or even the forceful loss of the proper mental faculties which by right we should all enjoy. We have to understand the root cause of the problems and we should avoid applying labels to the people who find themselves in pitiful and inhuman conditions that in civilised countries are anathema to the economical progress the country boasts about. Nobody however realises that human conditions may be the results of decisions taken by people in power or as a result of the economic world order. The artist is in the privileged position, should he choose so, to use his works to deliver the right message to make the public aware of worrying social issues and force a change for the better. Speaking
Your artistic production also grapples with the most prescient social issues of our unstable contemporary
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Narcisse 90cm x 90cm oils on canvas
for my country Malta, where government passed a
censorship, is in my opinion sending a wrong
law allowing artists to vilify religion with impunity
message to the population. It seems that
for the sake of art and free speech from
nowadays people are no longer sensitive to one
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Ray Piscopo
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Mind Bank 100cm x 100cm acrylics on canvas
another. That is why I want to paint hope, love and
highlight the intent of my painting Follow the
positivity rather than shock people to send them
Light. It is a painting sending out the message that
seek the light elsewhere. It is opportune here to
despite the ailments of this contemporary age,
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Free as a Bird 90cm x 80cm acrylics on canvas
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Follow the light 90 x 100cm acrylics on canvas
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Narcisse I was thinking about Caravaggio’s Narcissus and in my mind the contemporary equivalent of looking one’s self in the mirror or as a reflected image in water was the contemporary perennial ritual of phographing one’s self on a smart phone. People may not immediately realise that the painting actually portrayed this aspect of narcisism perhaps thinking the artist painting a lady taking a selfie. So in this case the title is used as a vehicle to direct attention at the concept behind the painting, or in my jargon looking for substrates below the surface layer of paint.
there is a light by which people can be guided to attain their freedom. Artists should be sensitive to the local environment and to the global scene. Their actions, through their works, should be conducive to make a solid and loud statement for what they stand for, irrespective of the ensuing flak or the lack of support one gets from state entities just because one stands for a particular cause. To conclude I can say that last year I took on personally a specific project to create a series of paintings on social issues, exactly on the issues you mentioned in your question. I wanted to raise awareness on the victims of abuse but at the same time it was aimed to keep in check people in power and people who influenced power with money. I had to abandon the project after doing 12 paintings as it got into me and took away all the lovely colours in my life. My outlook to life being positive orientated was in conflict with the artistic deviation I took. I exhibited the paintings last November and it made me feel very satisfied that the message went out far and wide and I had exceptional national coverage.
Having assigned the title It's Not What You Think It Is for an abstracted figurative work, I wanted perhaps to tell the viewer ‘ you are at liberty to think what my painting may transmit to you, but it is not what you think it is’. I had many people coming up to me with their own interpretation of the work and wanted me to confirm their evaluation of the forms and it was really exciting engaging with people in that manner, exchanging views as if something was there on canvas, but not there entirely. Other titles are more direct because I cannot assign another title especially if it is after a master. If I may be allowed to add another example of how I assign titles, I choose to mention On the 7th Day which is the title I gave to a painting depicting three Tritons sitting on the ground in front of the Gate to our capital city Valletta. At the time I painted it, a landmark fountain located at the entrance of Valletta had just undergone extensive resoration works after being damaged by misuse and neglect, rendering it back to its former glory. The Tritons Fountain consists of three bronze tritons holding up a huge basin inside a magnificent travertine marble outer basin with jets of water giving life to the modernist sculpture by Maltese artists Wilfred Apap and Victor Anastasi. In my allegorical painting I was intimating that the three bronze figures somehow also needed to rest after
Your artworks have often explanatory titles, as Narcisse, that allow you to clarify the message while maintaining the element of ambiguity: how do you go about naming your work ? In particular, is important for you to tell something that might walk the viewers through their visual experience? Giving titles to artworks is part of the creative process and mey even add value to the painting. It is not a simple identifier by which one can refer to a particular painting or to list it in a database. On the other hand I try to avoid titling the obvious, unless it is otherwise intended to be that way. More often than not when thinking about the concept or subject of the work to be painted, Iwould have already formed a notion of how I wanted the painting to be titled. In the case of
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My Thinker 90cm x 70cm acrylics on canvas 21 4 31
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Summer 2015 Special Issue Odalisque 90cm x 70cm acrylics on canvas
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in a way reflect my technical background, but the way I had deconstructed and abstracted them make interesting viewing (MindBank, No Holds Barred, Being Eccentric). I hope that in the near future this background will come to better use when the opportunity will finally present itself to realise artistic projects on technology-based installation pieces, getting the max synergy between Art and Science.
holding the basin since 1959 and that the restoration works were in sore need and due long ago. We have particularly appreciated the way your artwork reflects the synergy between Art and Science: as an engineer by profession, how do you see the relationship between creativity and scientific approach in our media driven contemporary age? And how does your artistic production reflect your scientific background?
Your work is held in many private collections in Malta, Italy, Ireland, England, France, Norway, Australia and United States of America and over the years you have successfully exhibited in a number of solo and group shows, both in Malta and abroad, including your recent show at The Old Mill- Lija in conjunction with the Citrus Festival and your upcoming exhibition at the Eden Cinema Foyer: as an artist and curator, how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? And what do you hope your audience take away from your artworks?
To answer your question about the relationship between creativity and scientific approach, I contend that inquiriy is at the heart of both of these methods but I believe that the performing and visual (video/films) arts sector stand to gain more than the visual artist producing paintings. However for 3D and art installation pieces there are enough examples to show how scientific approaches and creativity worked together to rope in involvment with the public achieving more interest and interaction. A science based approach involves three main stages: first there must be a primary thought or idea, then a hypothesis is formulated and tested, the outcomes of which are noted, and then finally the results determine which next step should be undertaken. The creative process is somehat similar. For 2D and perhaps even some 3D works, all the artist has to do is to realise the primary idea into a work on canvas or in clay/stone, perhapds going back to it in stages to improve the final output image/sculpture. With an installation involving technology this would still need the same process until the idea is put into a working model or a physical entity. With performing arts, the artistic production may be honed to be more acceptable to the project developer and eventually to meet the acceptance of the public. With 2D work the final production cannot be change to suit.
I am all the more happy when people interested in my paintings or in art in general approach me to discuss the various aspects of my works. It is a golden opportunity at the human level for interaction and engagement. It makes my efforts at creating art more satisfying and complete. Unless circumstances compel me otherwise I would always want to accompany my paintings wherever they are on show. I especially missed going to the New York Art Expo where I exhibited two paintings (The Rape of the Daughter of Leucippus and Faticida 2), as New York is another platform which is different from Europe. The interest in the paintings was enormous and the personal contact would have been a new experience for me. Interaction with the viewer is also another piece in the jigsaw of art making and I am very keen to engage. More than wanting to hear that my works are admired, or being liked on the social media, I
Some of my 2D artistic productions include certain elements from the physical engineering world that
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Exhibits from the exhibition ‘Abstract Rhythms in Nature’, St. Julians, Malta - 2016
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strive to get a one to one reaction because it is through personal contact that I can understand how my painting clicked or otherwise with the person. Since I opened my personal art gallery close to my studio (in Malta), I feel that this is the most exhilarating experience for an artist to engage in. Meeting viewers and explaining to them my outlook to art, my background and the paintings I have creating is an ensemble that people like and appreciate. It is more value adding and helps them to make an informed choice should they want to acquire paintings. That is why whenever I have online requests for art acqusitions I always invariably insist they come and see the painting in person before deciding to acquire there and then. Acquiring art is a personal experience and I have seen too many happy faces leaving my gallery.
My oeuvre actually consists of various artistic productions and if I can summarise, apart from the mainstream portfolio of large format paintings I create (some of them portrayed in this publication) and which I intend to keep on doing, I also cater for commissions (mostly figurative in nature, plus local and foreign landscapes including architecture). Since I had learned technical drawing I consider myself accomplished in detailing buildings and structures as can be seen from my various works, all of them having been acquired entirely. I also produce a series that I coined “Credit Card Collection’ being abstract works using a credit card / brush/ broom and a swiping technique. Then for the past two years I have delved into urban mail art being an extention of my incessant sketching effort. To clarify about this body of work, imagine street art works by Banksy drawn on a 23cm x 16cm envelope, only the designs are made by me. I have even designed my own postage stamps and franking dater which I then ‘post’ to myself for my collection.
As you rightly mentioned, I had rendered a free service as a curator responsible for setting up exhibitions over a 24-month period in one of Malta’s leading hotel. In parallel with my painting schedule I called up emerging and established artists (paintings, sculptures, photography and ceramics) to exhibit freely for a month. I managed to fit in schedules for 25 artists over the mentioned period and the outcome was awesome. In this case the ‘audience’ were fellow artists and I was facilitating their art to be apprciated by others.
This year I plan to exhibit my recent works in Italy and hopefully am looking at other foreign venues. At present all efforts are being undertaken solely by me and it weighs me down to a certain extent as I want to continue painting as much as I could. Having said this my dream is to use technology in creating art installations. Without giving away too much, I already have developed projects I wish to do but which need the efforts of computer programmers, video specialists and other specialists. Funds are needed to execute even modest installations let alone larger ones. Without such funding, everything must remain on the drawing board but I believe in my karma and is hoping that great things are yet to come.
We have appreciated the originality of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Ray. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? I appreciate your professionalism and dedication to up the standards in your publication and for giving me the opportunity to interact with a formidable team like you have at ART Habens.
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An interview by and
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, curator curator
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My New Sneakers 21 4 20
90cm x 60cm Special acrylics onIssue canvas
Lives and works in Paris, France
Summer in Paris, 2018
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video, 2013
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Change mind, 2018 Specialyour Issue
Soumisha Dauthel
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An interview by and
, curator curator
Hello Soumisha and welcome to ART Habens. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production we would like to invite our readers to visit https://www.soumishadauthel.com in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production and we would start this interview with a couple of introductory questions. You are basically a self taught artist, but you have a multifaceted background that includes political science, literature and art: how did those formative years degree in Aix en Provence help you to create your unique attitude to experiment with different media? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum direct the trajectory of your current artistic research? These multidisciplinary training courses have enabled me first of all to gain knowledge in the differentiated fields you have mentioned. Then, over time, I drew links between them, it allowed me to develop a "flexible" mind, which accepts other thought proposals. Moreover, with parents of distinct culture and religion (Russian-Arabic) very early on my mind was built in comparison, cross-analysis with an exacerbated curiosity. Travelling to Asia, Africa, the USA and many European countries has reinforced this attitude of thinking, this way of thinking that will impact my view of art, my artistic research and my approach. The notions of "non-definitive", "in the making", "common memory", "nonchronological time" will integrate my personal life and of course my artistic research. I like to give this image, for me the
Soumisha Dauthel
painting is built in the encounter, in a dialogue with other paintings that would reveal an unpredictable painting. Thus, plastic and visual experimentation becomes the leitmotiv of my creation, and what I call "connecting" (the bringing together, the linking of materials) as an act of construction of the work. Questioning the history of art in this way, I allow myself to no longer conceive painting
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Soumisha Dauthel
Just Human, end of 2018
as a style or an absolute, but as a model of relationship to the world. For me, to be a painter today is to accomplish this passage.
Special Issue
For this special edition of ART Habens we have selected Change your mind and Close but not quite, a couple of interesting
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Close but not quite, 2018 - Private Collection
Picnic, 2018
Soumisha Dauthel
ART Habens
does you address to such a permanent search for new techniques and pictorial processes?
artworks that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your unconventional style it's the way it allows you to condense in a single work of art such a coherent combination between intuition and a rigorous aesthetics: when walking our readers through your usual workflow and process, we would like to ask you if you think that there is a central idea that connects all your works.
In my youth I lived in the south of France and I admit that the movement supports/surfaces had a certain influence at the beginning of my research. And for the artists of my generation, opened up a free field for us to carry out plastic experiments. Perception, visual exercise remains very important in my work, the quality of my materials are essential so I create each of my materials. I like painting, drawing, engraving like many artists. I also enjoy revisiting the colours of classical painters, traditional fabrics, and tints used in various cultures. I have a sublimation relationship with the paint material, its texture, its fluidity, the paste, the energy of the colours, their dilutions. The realization of my materials corresponds to a time when I will manifest gestures of painting, a physical energy, a collective pictorial memory. When I create my material, I create it independently of its future use and without correlation with other materials. It is a time when the thought goes into "pause" mode and gives way to gestural expression, that of the body. It is painting that calls for painting. I let a feeling develop pictorially that will express itself in the moment. This feeling is of course imbued with my environment, the music I listen to, my mood, what I have experienced in recent or earlier times. It is the energy of life that is expressed through my body on canvas or large sheets of paper. I am closer to performance than to pictorial exercise. So every time, I have the freedom to paint as I feel it. I am talking about the technique of painting, but it can be that of
The two artworks "Change your mind and Close but not quite" humorously address my privileged themes (let's remain curious and attentive to the changes in our societies). These two titles of paintings correspond to the titles of two recent songs, listened to in the workshop. The music, its rhythm, its melody, its sound insistence intervene in my gaze when implementing a piece. Your question about the central idea that connects all my works is a very interesting and complicated at the same time, because at first sight my works look so different from one another. I'm going to reason out loud. What all my paintings would have in common is that each painting has its own form. They are composed of assembled elements, they are composed of different painting styles, more or less identifiable pictorial expressions and also of certain painted elements that can be found in several paintings. My main idea is to build a visual entity. We’d love to ask you about the qualities of the materials that you include in your artworks: how do you select them and what
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drawing and engraving. The end of the exercise is when I no longer have any physical energy. All my materials are the traces of my life flow. We have really appreciated the vibrancy of thoughtful nuances of your arworks: likewise, we like the way Summer in Paris and It's My Destiny shows that vivacious tones are not indispensable in order to create tension and dynamics. How do you settle your color palette? And how much does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in a specific artwork in order to acheive such brilliant results? As for my "color palette ", I will use the term "materials palette " instead. It is made up of paintings created during periods of pictorial expression. The choice of my materials involves a long visual trial and error; I first observe oils, acrylics, on paper, on canvas, charcoal, inks, engraving proofs. Then come the colors, their liveliness, depths, nuances, substance, patterns, surface roughness or brilliance, the effects of runout, impasto. I then proceed without any preliminary sketches to draw and cut shapes. I bring the elements together until a dialogue takes shape, generates a specific energy, so that an entity imposes itself. It is the assembly process that will materialize the construction of the work. The bringing together, the linking of materials to each other, take most of my time. This is what I call the "Connecting" time. Put in contact materials, creating passages between them requires a great visual concentration that integrates uncertainties such as: What do they question, what do they tell us, where do they lead us ? What emotions do they carry? Then I confront the problems encountered when composing a painting. All the questions of plastic practice are added, the relationships between colors, mass,
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Soumisha Dauthel
ART Habens
It's my destiny, 2018
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Soumisha Dauthel
Together is better, 2018
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Soumisha Dauthel
ART Habens
energy, tension, inner and outer forms, tension between the shape of the painting and its surface, direct or sibylline narratives. This long process can take several months. Marked out with a powerful narrative drive, your artworks shows captivating combination between abstraction and reference to recognizable patterns: in this sense, we daresay that your works seems to invite to question the idea of perceptionlook inside of what appear to be seen, rather than its surface, urging the spectatorship to see beyond the surface of the work of art. How important is for you to invite the viewers to elaborate personal meaning? And in particular, how open would you like your artworks to be understood? My abstract paintings are places of emergence of the imaginary, by bringing together differences in pictorial styles, unexpected colours and patterns. I like to think that my pictorial encounters united in a painting will immerse the viewer in an intense visual experience. The viewer encounters my paintings through sensitivity, visual perception, feeling. I have noticed that some spectators behave as if they were facing a person, they observe, discover and then only dialog. The paintings induce a visual experience with several dimensions of reading, the visual sensation, the narrative journey, perspective, in relief, leading some to talk about sculpture - painting. If you want - well, let's look together at Still meet and tell and Cultural Meeting. The first perception is a burst of colours that seem disharmonic while being attractive, for example, pink next to green. Then, as they approach the work, the coloured masses generate a fkind of harmony, in any case more embracing, more generous. These colours
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memory and tradition playing within your work as an artist? And in particular, how closely Art can reflect its time?
seem to communicate with each other, a luminous energy takes over (especially for Cultural Meeting). Then you notice that these colours are either flat tints or planes with often repetitive patterns without being identical. On the patterned plans the trace of the brush is visible. By swinging the head slowly from one side to the other, we can see the hybrid forms of lines that delimit territories of painting, like a drawing without materiality.
Each of my paintings contains materials that come from painting times, which can be several years old. When I choose them, assemble them, I connect times of memory that belong to moments in my life. Each painting fragment is a memory record that I unite in the present time of creation. This is how I interpret the "superposition of temporalities". It would be very enriching for me to discuss this notion with other disciplines.
There are also shiny surfaces and other matt surfaces on the same plane. You also notice that in each of the two paintings there are regular intertwining of grid- shaped lines with different plastic intentions, one tone on tone for Still meet and tell while in Cultural Meeting these intertwining are of different colours on a coloured background. You step back to see them again in their globality and there, for each of them, an external shape seems to cut through the wall. Despite their format differences, one 135 x 76 cm and Cultural Meeting 90 x 44 cm, the outlines of the paintings evoke the outline of a pencil stroke. And finally, if you look at the unity of the painting by pinching your eyes, half closed eyes, what happens to you, what do you see?
I remain amazed by the way we live while carrying within us an experience, a personal and collective history, knowledge, beliefs... I have a lot of respect for the life of the human being. When I was younger, when I was wondering about the notion of identity, I discovered the philosophy of the poet and writer Édouard Glissant. These thoughts allowed me to put words and images to my questions. And more than that, they reinforced the continuity of my research at the time on "rhizome identity" and " The linking up". Does art reflect its time ? All you have to do is visit a contemporary art gallery anywhere in the world to be quickly immersed in the questions posed by the works.
Your artistic research is pervaded with philosophical and spiritual questions, and as you once remarked in a previous interview, you continuously explore the idea of ''the superposition of temporalities''. Reminding us of Anne Ancelin SchĂźtzenberger's theories, this aspect of your artistic journey seems to unveil the elusive, still ubiquitous influence of the past on our everyday life: how do you consider the concepts of
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These questions often focus on major societal issues or topics related to geopolitical situations. Creation reflects its time and all the apprehensions of peoples. The particularity of artistic creation is that it carries both its history and its future through its plastic questioning. I distinguish the
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Run to you, 2018 - Private Collection
ART Habens
Soumisha Dauthel
Wake up, 2018, 2017
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Soumisha Dauthel
ART Habens
Radiate, 2018
Cultural meeting, 2018
We sometimes tend to ignore the fact that a painting - and a work of art in general - is a three-dimensional, physical, artefact: how do you how do you consider the relation between the abstract nature of the concepts that you explore in your artistic research and the physical aspect of your daily practice as an artist?
creation of art, and in particular the art presented by institutions. If art is understood as the institutional show of creation, then the reflection of its time may have some distortions depending on the political stakes of the countries concerned.
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exhibitions, including your upcoming solo at Valerius Art Gallery, in Luxembourg : how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience ? And what do you hope your audience take away from your artworks? I am very happy to present a solo from April 25th on of this year at Valerius Art Gallery in Luxembourg. For the first time, the Luxembourg public and those from neighbouring countries, Germany, Belgium, France will be able to discover for the first time in a large space large format paintings and drawings that I really like. I would like visitors to look at and see my paintings as a personal experience and an unespected dialogue begins.
My artistic approach began in the 90s, and has never ceased to be supported by a back and go between my understanding of the world and a clear identification of the plastic issues that were at stake in my work. Looking at these paintings from the 90s, we can see that the implementation of the material, the problem of cutting, and the linking of the fragments were already present (Below is a 1990 painting exhibited at the Passages art centre in Troyes - 1990). At that time I was talking about the organic relationship, the exchanges between cells, the organization of plastic communication circuits. My paintings then expressed an organization-system of paint cells. The three-dimensional artifact is the physical presentation of an incessant dialogue between plastic questions and concepts. One fleshes out the other as if to testify to the limits between the intangible power of the imagination and the constraining physical power of the world.
We have really appreciated the multifaceted nature of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Soumisha. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future ?
A work of art can be considered a combination between understanding reality and hinting at the unknown: how does everyday life's experience fuel your creative process?
I was also asked by Camilla Moresi to open her G/ART/EN gallery in Como, Italy. This solo exhibition will start on September 21st, a lot of work awaits me. That's great. In parallel, I work on format variables for my drawings. How charcoal lines bring together, reconcile, modify the appearance of paint fragments ?
I think I've already answered your question. I would like to add that I like the simplicity of everyday life: talking with the supply salesman across the street, buying vegetables and flowers at the Wednesday market, taking public transport to meet friends, visiting an exhibition in a gallery, listening to music in a concert hall, <taking walks with no specific purpose in Paris. And when possible, walk by the sea. All this also feeds my creative process.
I would like to share with you my joy at being selected for the Biennal Edition of ART Habens. This allows me to disseminate my artworks to a wider audience of professionals and I hope to open new collaborations. An interview by
Over the years your artworks have been showcased in a number of solo and group
SummerIssue 2015 Special
and
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, curator curator
My thoughts of you, 2019
Lives and works in Wheeling, WV , USA
Korzenie #1, 18 x 24 in. , monotype, silkscreen, charcoa
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Martyna Matusiak
ART Habens
video, 2013
l on paper mounted to wood panel, 2018 427 5
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ART Habens
Martyna Matusiak
3 Shield #1, 15.5 in x 19 in., drypoint, chine-collĂŠ , charcoal, 402019 Special Issue
An interview by and
, curator curator
Hello Martyna and welcome to ART Habens. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production we would like to invite our readers to visit http://www.martynamatusiak.com in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production and we would start this interview with a couple of introductory questions. You have a solid formal training and after having earned your MA in Art Education from the University of Opole, you moved to the United States to nurture your education with an MFA in Drawing, that you received from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania: how did those formative years influence your evolution as an artist and help you to develop your attitude to experiment with different media? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum due to your Polish roots direct the trajectory of your current artistic research? Hello and thanks for the interview.
Martyna Matusiak
Switching continents at the beginning of my 20s for sure influenced my artistic practice, just as it made an impact on my world viewand self-awareness. I felt so uncomfortable surrounded by foreign language and new culture. Just living day to day was hard. On top of that I was making art and had to defend it in an academic setting – honestly, I didn’t even know what a ‘critique’ was going into art school. Before coming to United States I was lucky to have supporting professors in Poland. They
guided me and encouraged me in my practice. I got such a strong foundation art training in Opole, Poland it continues to influence me today. It’s not the only aspect that had an inpact on me. I grew up in small mining city. I was raised at communistic multifamily apartment building surrounded by hundreds of multifamily buildings identical in structure - bloki. Strong lines, lack of color, and lack of green space, in
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addition to the small mining city rhythm, influenced my point of view and sensitivity. I often wonder if that’s why my own art is often monochromatic, or has a limited color pallet and uses repetition. Anyway, I developed the attitude to experiment with different media because of limitations I experienced. Firstly, I had limited exposure to art. My dad was a miner in our small city; my mom was a social worker at the same mining company. Being an artist simply wasn’t in the common vocabulary, yet they nurtured my creative side by providing me with monthly magazines about Great Masters of Art or set of new pencils and paint. I remember when I decided to apply to an art program. It was a last minute idea, and the exam incorporated a practical assesmet - a few hours painting session. It was actually the first time ever I painted on canvas, ever. I had no idea what I was doing. I will never forget that, I didn’t even know how to set up an easel during the exam. I would just watch everybody around me. While in art school, I had all of these ideas in mind and I would just experiment with how to get them out. I needed training, so I listened. I was a good student. I didn’t rebel or fight. I wasn’t the student to break the rules. I clearly followed directions of my professors, and inhale art history lectures. I was hungry to learn, I felt fortunate to be able to attend college in the first place, and even more lucky to attend art program. In graduate school, in United States, I had to really experiment with techniques, simply because I couldn’t afford expensive papers or art materials. I would draw on
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Martyna Matusiak
ART Habens
Korzenie#2,18 x 24 in. , monotype, photolithography, silkscreen, charcoal on paper mounted to wood panel, 2018 21 4 61
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ART Habens
Martyna Matusiak
Korzenie #3,18 x 24 in. , monotype, color pencils, photolithography, silkscreen, charcoal on paper mounted to woo Special Issue
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Martyna Matusiak
ART Habens
wallpaper or cardboard for that reason. I used all the lessons from my formal training in Poland, just on cheap materials. I chose drawing as my major in graduate school, because I thought printmaking was simply too expensive with itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fancy papers and inks. I really felt printmaking was my language. I had to experiment with expressing myself in English. I surrounded myself with exceptional likeminded artists who become friends for life. I never gave in to competition in grad school- what for? I was provided with a studio space, I had the opportunity to be a graduate assistant in printmaking classes under spectacular professors and I was making a living on $36/month. Honestly, looking back at that time, I am grateful for such amazing stimuli. Now, I think it is important to challenge myself with new environments, processes and ideas. What has at once captured our attention of your unconventional style it's the way it allows you to condense in a single work of art such a coherent combination between intuition and a rigorous aesthetics: when walking our readers through your usual workflow and process, we would like to ask you if you think that there is a central idea that connects all your works. In life, we experience so much fragmentation of thoughts and feelings. For me, creating art brings things back together. It helps me process events, actions and memories. It keeps me grounded. You ask about about intuition. In my own work, intuition figures heavily throughout. It the beginning, developing the basic sketches d panel, 2018 21 4 63
Special Issue
Korzenie #3,18 x 24 in. monotype, color pencils, photolithography, silkscreen, charcoal on paper mounted to wood panel, 2018
ART Habens
Martyna Matusiak
for the work is deeply reflective and intuition driven . Later, bringing those sketches together into a form—creating a context, working to something that feels cohesive and complete. That’s incredibly powerful for me—something that really keeps me going. I work in diverse media often combining printmaking with drawing to create larger installations. Repetition, variation and sequencing are major elements of my practice. In each of the pieces, I work with printed imagery as well as hand- drawn elements. Beyond traditional printmaking techniques (mostly intaglio and lithography) I use disposable, readily available materials such as painter’s tape, magazines scraps, and sharpie marker which emphasize the immediacy, commonality, and temporary nature of these phrases. My process of making each plate however requires many stages of etching and proofing. Certain passages on a given plate appear in multiple pieces but in different periods of completion. Not only am I adding more information to the resulting image through direct drawing, but I am also working reductively on the paper. I am cutting into the prints and peeling back layers of paper as well as physically erasin parts of the printed and directly drawn elements to serve as an antecedent to the plate-making process. These gestures solidify my assertion of the plate and print as equal parts of my process. My process of proceeding with the drawing on a print allows me to observe things revealing and showing themselves. I am interested in this phenomenon because it challenges the way we orient ourselves in
Korzenie #4,1 Special Issue
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Martyna Matusiak
ART Habens
8 x 24 in. , monotype, color pencils, photolithography, silkscreen, charcoal on paper mounted to wood panel, 2018 21 4 67
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ART Habens
Martyna Matusiak
Korzenie #5,18 x 24 in. , monotype, spray paint, color pencils, collage, photolithography, silkscreen, charcoal on pa Special Issue
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Martyna Matusiak
ART Habens
regard to the world. We generally have a very egotistical view regarding our value in life. My practice is a refusal of this way of thinking. For this special edition of ART Habens we have selected Korzenie, an interesting project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once impressed us of the results of your artistic research is the way it unveils the point of convergence between personal history and collective memory, bringing the notion of family to a new level of significance. Would you tell us something about the genesis of Korzenie? In particular, how did you develop this project in order to achieve such brilliant results? The idea for Roots came up when my daughter Lena (age 4 now) was diagnosed with a Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD). PKD is a genetic disease in which clusters of cysts develop primarily within kidneys, causing kidneys to enlarge and lose function over time. PKD is mainly a painful hereditary disease. Both my husband and I have no family history of the condition nor were we aware of it. It is hard to predict the progress of the disease and it’s complications. PKD affects our family and influences our family tree from now on. Will this effect Lena’s decision to have children? Is Lena’s diagnosis stopping us from having more kids? Lena’s diagnosis made me track back my personal family history as well as my husband’s. My family images of close kinfolk and distant relatives become icons of an identity, love, joy and strength.
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Korzenie #6,18 x 24 in. monotype, color pencils, collage, photolithography, silkscreen, charcoal on paper mounted to wood panel, 2018
ART Habens
Martyna Matusiak
I base many of my works in the series on photographs that belonged to my grandmother, aunts, and mother as well as images acquired from my husband’s side of the family—images found in shoeboxes, forgotten in the bottoms of drawers, or found among the tattered black pages of old leather-bound photo albums. The photographs have very personal meanings for me as the artist, but I have found also that there is an almost universal recognition among viewers of a sense of history and identity, evoking memories of their own family’s past. What began as a way to investigate my family’s medical history grew into a deeper meditation to gain a better sense of what family means as I spent countless hours staring at their photographs and into the eyes of my loved ones, past and present. It's important to remark that Korzenie is a Polish word that means ''roots'' and that this series draw from your family life. A work of art can be considered a combination between understanding reality and hinting at the unknown: how does everyday life's experience fuel your creative process Yes, you are right – thanks for noticing. I don’t look far for inspirations. I draw ideas from ordinary objects as family photographs, toys, family notes, or domestic actions like my mom’s obsession of putting everything in tight boxes and stacking and squeezing them into impossible combinations. I gather these ordinary events, words, images and ideas in my mind sometimes for several months.
Korzenie #7,18 x 24 in Special Issue
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Martyna Matusiak
ART Habens
. , monotype, color pencils, collage, photolithography, silkscreen, charcoal on paper mounted to wood panel, 2018 21 4 73
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ART Habens
Martyna Matusiak
Korzenie #9,18 x 24 in. , spray paint, stencil, monotype, color pencils, collage, photolithography, silkscreen, charcoa Special Issue
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Martyna Matusiak
ART Habens
That means sometimes I would be out of the making groove for several months. I never think about creating just one piece of art. The idea comes first, and I execute it in series or body of work, sometimes in various mediums and approaches. When I figure out what my work is about, I binge work in the studio like crazy, sometimes working on several pieces at once non-stop. I used to be mad at myslef that I am out of the studio for a day or two. Motherhood changed my mindset about working habits. I accepted these blasts of making because it allows my ideas to grow, change and refocus. When I come to the studio, I am ready. And above, I think in the world of perfectionism we often hide and practice, and re-draw and re-run and re-touch until the work is flawless. I think that it’s ok to show up before the show, before it’s ready. We often have this perception that we don’t want to do something until we are good at it. It’s never perfect.I think the process of making, experiencing, and understanding art is closely tied to our personal and social knowledge. Art practice is not only a part of art history, but also of our collective human experience. Everyday I encourage myself and my students to see visual art practice as part of a larger framework. Marked out with a powerful narrative drive, Korzenie seems to invite to question the idea of perception look inside of what appear to be seen, rather than its surface, urging the spectatorship to see beyond the surface of the work of art. How important is for you to invite the viewers to elaborate personal meaning? And in particular, how open would you like your artworks to be understood?
l on paper mounted to wood panel, 2018 21 4 75
Special Issue
Korzenie #11,18 x 24 in. spray paint, stencil, monotype, color pencils, collage, photolithography, silkscreen, charcoal on paper mounted to wood panel, 2018
ART Habens
Martyna Matusiak
What is most important to me as an artist and is authenticity of voice. Voice is an intangible but discernible sensibility that threads through and ties together a body of work. It can be loud or quiet, but we always feel it. Although Korzenie grew from a personal issue, the aim of the work is to return the viewer to a specific moment in time—not a monumental or historic moment, just a simple, personal moment in one man’s family history. While it may be possible to peel back or peer around the layers in these works to reveal deeper intent, it may be just as possible to look at these works and think about a favorite aunt or brother’s old red BMX bike. We all have our own biases and we all approach art from such a different backgrounds. As an artist you not only make works to be admired. I think art is a key that unlocks other people. As a maker, I open doors not really knowing what is on the other side. Then my work is not mine anymore. I don’t consider my art to be my baby, I am not going to babysit it and follow it around to make sure it is understood. It’s not my job. My job is to think, contemplate, comment, sketch and then make the piece. There is no ‘after’ coming from me. Each person might read it differently. There is no wrong way of experiencing the art. It's pretty amazing. We’d love to ask you about the qualities of the materials that you include in your artworks, with a particular focus on your current artistic production: as an artist working with diverse media, how do you
Korzenie #12,18 x 24 in. , spray paint, stenc Special Issue
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Martyna Matusiak
ART Habens
il, monotype, color pencils, collage, photolithography, silkscreen, charcoal on paper mounted to wood panel, 2018 21 4 79
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Martyna Matusiak
Korzenie #13,18 x 24 in. , spray paint, stencil, monotype, color pencils, collage, photolithography, silkscreen, charco Special Issue
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Martyna Matusiak
ART Habens
select them and what do you address to combine print based work with drawings and image transfer? I am currently working on a new body of work where I explore the ideas of impermanence and comment on our desire for longing of deep and meaningful relationships in the age of immediacy and urgency. Major sites of uncertainty and impermanence that repeatedly come into focus for me include everyday objects (ex. Amazon cardboard box), family life/ home and the human body (mostly my daughter’s). The hierarchies of these constantly fluctuate between the minuscule and the monumental, slipping in and out of stasis as they are acknowledged or ignored throughout my process of making. With the initial form of crumpled or stacked Amazon cardboard boxes, a metaphor for failure, I begin the exploration of interactions with self, others, and object to reiterate the complexity of representation. To collect in order to remember. To collect in order to control. To collect in order to contain. As we negotiate and gather (in boxes) moments within everyday life, experiences accumulate and build. More specifically, Amazon Prime box serves well not only the idea of collecting and controlling, but is a point of departure for suggesting our impatience, desire for instant gratification and urgency. Waiting can be really hard, and when people don’t get what they want, the psychological reaction is anxiety. Let’s move to another focus of mine: body. Here I continue reflect on my daughter’s al on paper mounted to wood panel, 2018 21 4 81
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Martyna Matusiak
pessimistic view of societal relationships, but for me it is the dichotomy of feeling warmth and being wounded that rings true. I can feel joy and sorrow at the same time because I can live in the threshold between the two. Love can be present in the midst of conflict.
condition, similarly as in Korzenie. This time, I ponder and reflect about our desire for free will and something that is predetermined. Her condition also triggered few ideas other ideas, commenting about the body as a container, and then just simple act of waiting – waiting in hallways to doctors’ office, waiting for disease to take over, waiting for cysts to appear, waiting –but not being able to control her body in any way, waiting for her to be in pain. Series Shields (in progress) were created as an attempt to protect, and control, but ultimately as we attempt to construct ourselves into unique beings, our genetic mapping remain outside of our control, embedded inside us at from the moment of conception.
Through an alignment of these three points of focus – the object, the body and the place – prints are situated between body and dwelling and follow the interplay between shadow and structure. Simultaneously holding up and being supported by each other, these relational forms will dress and snug (like a good hug from my child), will fold (like a cardboard box), will collapse and grow (like cysts) on top of themselves to represent the abundance of information, lack of control, restlessness and scarcity of human attention. I present the fine line between the temporal and the eternal, as well as the uncomfortable similarities found in the primal desire for instant gratification and the need of self preservation.
Finally, (The family space). This aspect revolves around three related themes familial relationships; home as the critical place/container where those relationships develop; and liminal space as the place where a person or object can exist on both sides of a boundary. I think of home just as a space for comfort, discord, division, joy, love and sorrow. This is home—this is family. I am intrigued by these dualities and weave them into my work. Arthur Schopenhauer’s story of the porcupines caught in a snowstorm captures nicely the nature of these dualities. In order to keep warm, the porcupines huddle together, but by doing so they wound each other. To remedy this, they must find the middle ground the space that both affords sufficient warmth and does not cause too much harm. Schopenhauer tends to relate his parable of the porcupines with a
Summer 2015 Special Issue
We have really appreciated the vibrancy of thoughtful nuances of your artistic production: likewise, we like the way many of your works show that vivacious tones are not indispensable in order to create tension and dynamics. How do you settle your color palette? And how much does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in a specific artwork in order to achieve such brilliant results? The progression of my work has been an experimentation with color - or lack of color
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Shield #2, 15.5 in x 19 in. drypoint, chine-collĂŠ, tape transfer, charcoal, 2019
Shield #3, 15.5 in x 19 in. photolithography, charcoal, 2019
Martyna Matusiak
ART Habens
- and the challenge of communicating within a narrow range of execution. The relationship between color and space in my work is one that shifts from agreement to opposition. At times color functions as carrier in the creation of illusionistic space, while at other times it acts in opposition. I never felt too comfortable with vibrant colors. As I mentioned earlier, I like limitations. I add color when I feel the piece absolutely needs it, I am interested of presenting my ideas through most essential marks, lines and texture. I often fail that assignment but instead of starting over- I keep reworking the piece. I often challenge myself and iaise a question: How I can reduce it to most essential marks and still keep the meaning?
Over the years your artworks have been showcased in a number of solo and group exhibitions: how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? And what do you hope your audience take away from your artworks?
We sometimes tend to ignore the fact that a work of art is a three-dimensional, physical, artefact: how do you how do you consider the relation between the abstract nature of the concepts that you explore in your artistic research and the physical aspect of your daily practice as an artist?
We have really appreciated the multifaceted nature of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Martyna. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future?
I really hope that my work impacts people in some way. Art is pretty much what shapes our personality. Here's why: no one likes art just for â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;artâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. You like it because you like the author, the meaning, the form, the appearance, the message it conveys, the sound it makes, the memories they evoke, and the feelings they portray. The idea is to create a certain and somewhat indefinable emotional command- I do strive for that for my viewers to experience.
As an artist I am constantly searching for diverse formats to express myself. This search has not only enabled me to create artworks that are unique and relevant, but has also enhanced my aspiration of being innovative and resourceful. I like to learn new techniques in printmaking. I never relay on just intaglio or relief. Most recently I am experimenting with carborandum prints. I am surrendering my practice to a medium that works for the project. Layers push and pull the work into completion. My hands always follow the idea. The idea is always first for me.
Thanks so much for your time and all really stimulating questions. I made me reflect more on my practice and approaches. Nowâ&#x20AC;ŚI have so much to do! I am currently working on Shields and another new piece titled Umbilical Cord that you can see a preview of at www.martynamatusiak.com. An interview by and
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, curator curator
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Lives and works in San Francisco, California
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Nancy Calef
ART Habens
video, 2013
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Nancy Calef
Uncharted
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An interview by and
, curator curator
Hello Nancy and welcome to ART Habens. Before elaborating about your artistic production we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and you studied painting and sculpture at the College of New Rochelle and you are also a certified computer animator: how did those formative years influence your evolution as a multidisciplinary artist? In particular, how does your multifaceted cultural substratum due to the years you spent in Europe and Thailand, as well as your frequent travels throughout the United States and many other countries direct the trajectory of your current artistic research? Thank you for the opportunity to discuss my creative process. Early formal art education began at College of New Rochelle when I was fifteen, allowing exploration of drawing, sculpture, design and art history. Painting became my great gift, having endured a challenging childhood in New York City as a model with an unbalanced stage mother. I turned to art as a coping tool. By working from the inside out, in conceiving and executing each piece, I discovered the mechanism to confront my self-destructive demons, uncover my beliefs, and transform negative energy into enduring production.
Nancy Calef
natural progression; not only have I animated original drawings, and my own paintings, but I've also refined my perspective and the movement of my characters in modeled relief.
My training as a computer animator came decades later, having already established my painting style creating "Peoplescapes" in oil, while often adding relief and other 3D elements. Acquiring 3D animation skills was a
Extensive travel abroad has exposed me to foreign cultures and widened my own world
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Nancy Calef
view, revealing common threads running through people from all nationalities. I mine this subject in depth, depicting universal aspects of the human condition. My relationship to art has given me a home in the world. Plein-air landscape painting introduced me to oils; as I journeyed around the world, I could communicate with my brush by capturing people in their environment. I especially enjoy painting nightscapes. (see Uncharted, oil & acrylic on canvasses, 30" x 24"). We have appreciated the way the results of your artistic inquiry convey such a coherent combination between intuition and a rigorous aesthetic, and we would like to invite our readers to visit https://www.nancycalefgallery.com in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production: when walking our readers through your usual setup and process, we would like to ask you if you think that there is a central idea that connects all your works. My work is motivated by the search for truth, including all of life's peaks and valleys, internal, external, its bright and dark facets. Does every color, line, and shape honestly reflect what I'm feeling and envisioning at the time? My organic relationship with the canvas springs forth from that central idea. For this special edition of ART Habens we have selected Inevitability Line, an interesting work that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your style is the way it brings the notion of everyday life to a new level of significance: when discussing the genesis of this
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Nancy Calef
ART Habens
Inevitability Line
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Nancy Calef
The Investigation
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Nancy Calef
ART Habens
stimulating artwork, would you tell us how does everyday life's experience fuel your creative process? Everyday experiences are essential to the development of all my work. Inevitability Line (oil, sculpture, fabric, found objects on canvas, 48" x 60") was conceived while riding the New York Railway commuter from Grand Central Station to visit my ailing father in a rehabilitation center. It was the perfect metaphorical (and real) platform to explore the undeniable fact that we're all riding the same mortality train. In this piece, the conductor takes the "Destiny transit -- one entry/one exit" ticket from a man listening to an audio book with earphones made from oxygen equipment. The surface of the car's floor contains common symbols of daily life. We like the powerful narrative drive characterizing your Peoplescapes, and as you have remarked in your artist's statement, each painting weaves together a story about contemporary life, to question a wide variety of themes, including race, global warming, toxins in our food, corruption in the financial, medical and pharmaceutical industries. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, "the artist's role differs depending on which part of the world theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re in. It depends on the political system they are living under". Does your artistic research respond to a particular cultural moment? In particular, how do you consider the role of artists in our media driven and globalized contemporary age? Given the current state of American politics, I have feverishly been creating work
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ART Habens
Nancy Calef
expressing the dysfunction in Washington DC under the current administration, and the reverberating effect it has on the world at large. My hope lies in the natural flow allowing the push and pull of evolution to eventually foster preservation of our species. In The Investigation, (oil, sculpture, fabric, found objects 36" x 60"), Kali, the Hindu Goddess of destruction, is spewing out the world's political players who are battling good and evil. The sea is rising and facts are being tested. To identify the actors in this mise en scène please see: https://www.nancycalefgallery.com/Investigation.html
Creative people have the ability to guide others out of complacency, to offer a wider perspective, potentially breaking through stagnation and/or a limited mindset in one side of the brain. Our media-driven society is conducive to brainwashing, lies, and the manipulation of one's views to satisfy greedy power plays. This compels me to use my art as activism highlighting vital cultural moments. Indeed I have advocated causes relevant to healthcare, education, civil rights, immigration and our environment for almost thirty years. Global Warming is the urgent issue of our time. The reckless and ignorant disrespect for our planet is exemplified in The Ref (oil, sculpture, fabric on canvas, 36" x 48") In the audience, Al Gore, Governor Jerry Brown, international environmentalists Chico Mendes, Wangari Maathai, Edward Abbey and Aldo Leopold, along with the Koch brothers and the rest of the Animal Kingdom, watch Earth being beaten by the human. We have really appreciated the vibrancy of thoughtful nuances of your canvas, and we like
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Nancy Calef
ART Habens
Escape
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Nancy Calef
Tai Chi
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Nancy Calef
ART Habens
the way the vivacious tones of Tai Chi and World Music create tension and dynamics. How did you come about settling on your color palette? And how much does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in a specific artwork and in particular, how do you develop a texture? Although I deal with challenging, sometimes dark issues, those "vivacious tones" passionately connect my intuition to the subject matter. Optimism drives my palette in Tai Chi, (oil, sculpture, fabric on canvas, 30" x 40"). California's golden light influenced the color scheme, illuminating the background trees, as the local Chinese women perform their daily exercise routine. After thinking that I'd fully executed the moment, the characters in the foreground began calling out for movement; so I built them up with clay and added additional 3D touches to resolve the painting. World Music, (48" x 60" oil on canvas), on the other hand, was interconnected from its inception; the concept of depicting the lyrical expression of international musicians, flowing from one country's genre to another, felt complete in oil. Rich in symbolism and humor, we daresay that your artistic practice aims to look inside what appears to be seen, rather than its surface, providing the spectatorship with freedom to realize their own perception. How important is it for you to invite the viewers to elaborate personal meaning? As a visual storyteller, I present everyday circumstances that evoke the viewer's
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Nancy Calef
No Free Lunch
personal identification. In No Free Lunch (oil, sculpture, found objects on canvas, 48" x 48"), the airline sells advertising space in addition to
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water and oxygen. Materialism and exploitation have replaced courtesy, respect and safety.
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Nancy Calef
ART Habens
Stupor Market
Most people accept that we no longer live in a consumer-oriented society. Revolving Door (oil, sculpture, found objects
on canvas, 36" x 36") is a metaphor for the concept that "change is the only constant in life."
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Nancy Calef
Revolving Door
We like the way your artworks convey such a stimulating combination between figurative elements and captivating abstract feeling, as
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the interesting Day At The Circus, whose background creates such an oniric atmosphere. How would you consider the
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Nancy Calef
ART Habens
Composition In Alter Ego Major
relationship between abstraction and figurative in your practice? In particular, how does representation and a tendency towards
abstraction find their balance in your work? Manifesting each painting is akin to solving a
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Nancy Calef
puzzle. I'm obsessed with balance, aiming for cohesion on multiple levels, regardless of the subject matter. Composition and light, contrast, color and movement must all be considered. In Day at the Circus (oil, sculpture, fabric, found objects on canvas, 48" x 48"), the venue invites an abstracted aerial space: lights in motion, ethereal acrobats, mystery and excitement in the face of a child, all evoking a more intuitive reaction. Over the last decade I've also developed a new style: "Planeslashing," whereby I break the plane of the canvas inwardly as opposed to building it up with sculptured relief and applied materials. First I cut through selected finished paintings, then combine them with seemingly disparate pieces from another period, often integrating one or more fresh canvasses, adding sculpture and found objects, and eventually reattaching them. Painting into the deconstructed imagery as a whole, leaving portions of the underlying picture(s) intact, results in a cohesively transformed multi-dimensional work. This abstracted 3D style stimulates my imagination, opening a new world of non-linear concepts and abstractions. I constantly challenge my techniques, break boundaries and eliminate what doesn't work. Marriage (oil, found objects on canvasses 20" x 20"x 4") consists of several stacked paintings, slashed and angled to represent the merging of two individuals in body, mind and spirit. You are a versatile artist as your practice involves many techniques and mediums, including Video, Drawing, Sculpture and Music: what attracts you to such a wide variety of mediums? And how do you select a particular medium in order to express the idea that you explore in your artistic research?
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Nancy Calef
ART Habens
The Ref
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Nancy Calef
Playing For Your Supper
It seems the medium selects me and I have to rise to the occasion. Ideas often come in a flash; then I explore the best way to actualize them.
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While caring for an elderly aunt with Alzheimers, I channeled my anxiety and frustration over her loss of basic faculties into
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Nancy Calef
ART Habens
A Day at the Circus
a series of small, simple, brightly colored, wooden sculptures, with movable parts. See Skateboarder with Bird.(wood, watch, wire,
acrylic & oil paint, 22" x "4" x 4") They were displayed in the Union Bank lobby in San Francisco for several months. Composing
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Nancy Calef
Marriage
music is one of my most amazing experiences. I never aspired to be a songwriter until the night my mother died, twenty years ago. I wrote a song about her and music has been
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pouring out of me ever since. Melodies and lyrics stick in my consciousness. When facing a blank canvas, emotions I have trouble accessing, or are too painful to confront, are
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Nancy Calef
ART Habens
engineering to further develop the music. Now I share my songs with audiences. As a child model, I performed on demand, and developed a negative identification with the stage. The original music has emerged in a purifying and heartfelt way, and my gratitude and respect for this ability has cut through some old programming. Besides producing the interesting works that our readers have admired in these pages, you are also a writer and you also speak at literary and art forums and you sometimes speak about the role of art therapy in treating eating disorders: how importance did art-making play in your personal maturation and how could art help young generations to face the wide variety of issues that affect our ever-changing societies? Expressing myself through art has provided a foothold with which to wrestle my selfdestructive demons, connect to the world, and maybe earn my keep as a painter. As a young runway and photography model, I developed a life threatening food disorder and was forced to confront my self-loathing. By embracing my artistic passion, while honestly recognizing emotional upheaval as it arises, I was able to channel those negative impulses into disciplined production. By faithfully respecting this commitment, I successfully overcame the harmful behavior. Regardless of the medium one uses: writing, painting, drawing, cooking or playing an instrument, becoming absorbed in the process has transformative potential. Art saved my life, and this is what I share with others.
Skateboarder with Bird
often revealed and expressed through sound. Childhood piano lessons enabled me to understand the chords I was hearing in my head. Having studied computer interfaces, I was able to learn sound
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Nancy Calef
In my illustrated memoir: Peoplescapes -From Purging to Painting, I take the reader through my difficult early years, travelling and healing through the incredible power of allegiance to self-awareness and an artistic path. When writing my story, I became aware of the miraculous support, opportunity and grace that had accompanied my struggle. This has resonated with young people suffering from insecurity and self-destructive tendencies.
stage fright to bring love and light to the audience. I've learned to give up my ego in service to those who came to hear me; focusing on the purpose of my song, instead of myself, transcends that fear while enabling me to deliver it from my essence. I try to sustain this in all aspects of my life. We have really appreciated the multifaceted nature of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Nancy Calef. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future?
Over the years your artworks have been showcased, and you currently exhibit widely in museums and galleries in solo and group shows, moreover, you are also a singer: how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? And what do you hope your audience takes away from your artworks?
For the last four years, I have been producing large, topical Peoplescapes and a solo exhibition is in the works.- I'm currently working on a vertical triptych painting exploring three dimensions of existence: heaven, earth and hell. I was recently commissioned to paint one of New York City's historical icons for the cover of a graphic novel to be published in 2019. On the music front, I've been engineering recordings of my original music, and am working on three demos of newly composed songs in preparation for another animated music video.
Commercialization of one's art is the most difficult transition to make: from lonely studio to the community, trying not to ride the dramatic waves of public opinion. My goal is to get into people's minds and reach their heart, to connect and shake up their view, maybe see life a little differently. Artists learn to revere the process as its own reward, not to dwell on the thousands of hours spent endlessly digging inside themselves, struggling to answer the question: What's the point? I know I will leave my work behind for others to gain some sense of what our age was like; what every day human experiences do we share? What ruled our technology, our dark politics and teetering environment?
I really appreciate this interview, and hope it inspires others to delve into their innovative selves. An interview by and
There is a moment at every musical performance when I must overcome my
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, curator curator
Lives and works in Vero Beach, Florida USA and Atlanta, Georgia USA
I was born and grew up in India, participating in child art competitions from an early age. Being awarded a top prize at the age of ten in a national art competition sponsored by an Indian corporation with an eminent panel of juries that received national attention, and a solo exhibit of my selected work in a next competition hosted at the Birla Academy of Arts and Culture in Kolkata, India at the age of 11, and being awarded a trophy by eminent sculptor Chintamini Kar during the event spurred me on towards a career as a visual artist. I went on to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Chennai India. I moved to the United States and continued my education. During a Summer Study Abroad Program offered to me as a a student while completing my second Bachelors degree in Painting at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Illinois USA in 1992, I was influenced by the Impressionist movement particularly by Claude Monet's paintings. After extended visits to Monet's garden in Giverny during my three month's stay, my conceptual concept began developing as a body of work that compares the mental emotion of happiness as cycles of human life, to short-lived garden blooms. I consider both to be ephemeral and continually evolving as does the human life cycle. To visually portray happiness, I regularly employ intense colors that incorporate a variety of texture materials such as fabric, handmade papers, wood, etc. that are combined with the paint to create effects that extend beyond their two-dimensional surfaces. Painted with rapid brush strokes in an intuitive manner, my paintings are typically large in scale as I intend for the imagery to imagine continuity that dissipates at the edge of the canvases that have the painting continued on their sides. As an educator, I have taught academic classes in abstract, acrylic and mixed media painting, that are my mediums of choice for my paintings. In 2005 I was honoured with an invitation by the Keeper of the Royal Academy of Arts to complete a Visitor Artist tour at the Royal Academy Schools where I conducted a talk and image presentation and student tutorials during the paid visit. in 1995, art galleries on Broadway, New York City offered to exhibit my student work in solo and group exhibitions following a solo exhibit at the ARC Gallery/Educational Foundation in Chicago, Illinois in 1994. The shows in New York brought me recognition Special Issue
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Chitra Ramanathan
ART Habens
through critic reviews in publications including Manhattan Arts International Magazine. Further, through work entered on the internet in 1999 was followed by several of my originals being acquired by individual, business and educational sources such as a pair of large-sized, signed works based on my style of abstraction, a site-specific installation commissioned by MGM Resorts International, USA that are permanently housed inside the Bellagio Conservatory Indoor Botanical Garden at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas since 2004, two largescale paintings acquired by the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana Illinois in 1996, a wall mural measuring 13.8 feet across created at an elementary school in Indianapolis, as some examples of my public art installations. Completing professional artist residencies in Marny sur Seine, France with extended visits to Paris and Giverny in 2010, and the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy in 2012 have video, 2013 helped me further develop my style and work. 0 422
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Hello Chitra and welcome to ART Habens. Before starting to elaborate about the works that we have selected for this special edition, we would like to invite our readers to visit https://www.chitrafineart.com in order to get a wide idea about artistic production. We would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background: you have a solid formal training and after having earned your Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honors) in Painting, you nurtured your education with an MBA with a focus on Arts Administration & Human Resources: how did these formative years influence your evolution as an artist?
Chitra Ramanathan
by an eminent panel of juries which attracted national attention. These initial beginnings laid the foundation for my passion for visual art in later years leading to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Madras in Chennai, India. While enrolled in my second Bachelorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; degree program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after moving to the United States, I left for France to study art history and studio art in Paris during the summer of 1992. While there, I was particularly drawn to Claude Monetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Haystack series
Thank you for interviewing me for your special biennial issue, Art Habens! I should begin by sharing my early background with you. I began drawing and painting from early childhood while growing up in India, frequently garnering prizes through local and national art competitions. A solo exhibition accompanying my winning entry was featured at the Birla Academy of Arts and Culture in Kolkata when I was eleven years old. At the age of ten, I was declared one of the top winners in a contest sponsored by a major corporation, judged 4 04
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Chitra Ramanathan
The Effusion
depicting changing light situations
as the Abstract Expressionistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work
during the course of the day, as well
portraying mental emotions.
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Chitra Ramanathan
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Coruscation 21 4 06
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Elusive illusions
Chitra Ramanathan
Influenced by both movements, the thought of capturing fleeting and evolving moments in time, not as mere representational observations, but as non-objective abstract interpretations began to take shape in my mind. I chose happiness as my concept, comparing the emotion of the mind to ephemeral garden blooms and cyclical seasons and defining both as transitional while continually evolving. This concept became my focus of my personal and academic research. Happiness as a visual entity with a “formless form” as I have often described my concept, was born. On paper and canvas, I began making drawing and painting sketches attributing a “physical” identity to happiness through abstract imagery, often accompanied by hints of circular forms to denote evolution and movement. At about the same time, I began working on large unprimed, unframed canvases in my studio space at the university as well as in my home studio. Choosing to work large-scale presented me with freedom to explore my thought processes. Swiftly following my graduation, my identity as a contemporary artist became established. As my work in the early 1990s was receiving positive responses 21 4 08
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in both brick and mortar exhibitions that debuted on Broadway, New York City in 1995 and increasingly online, I saw a need to understand and manage the changing financial aspects of art sales, and enrolled in a Masters’ program in Business Administration the same year, with concurrent solo exhibitions in 1997 and 1998 in New York. During that period, my work began to get more saturated with not just painted imagery, but occasional smatterings of collages. The painting below was created while working on my M.B.A degree. The body of works that we have selected for this special edition of ART Habens and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article has at once captured our attention for the way you sapiently combined delicate tones with abstract feeling to communicate joyful sensation: would you tell us your sources for inspiration? I studied abroad to learn about art history and studio art in Paris, France during the summer of 1992. While there, I was particularly drawn to Claude Special Issue
Chitra Ramanathan
Monet’s Haystack series depicting changing light on the same object during the course of the day, as well as the Abstract Expressionists’ work portraying emotions. Capturing evolving and changing moments in time, not as representational observations, but as non-objective abstract interpretations, began to take shape in my mind. I chose to focus my personal and academic research on the concept of happiness, comparing emotions to ephemeral garden blooms and cyclical seasons and defining both as transitional and continually evolving. I began to refer to happiness as a visual entity with a “formless form,” and I began making drawing and painting sketches attributing a physical identity to happiness through abstract imagery with hints of circular forms on paper and canvas. At around the same time, I began working on large unprimed, unframed canvases. Choosing to work on a large scale provided me the freedom to extend the boundaries of physical space moment with less restrictions to explore mental inspirations of the moment. Apart from the academic and experiential beginnings that I described 21 4 10
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above, I have derived ongoing inspiration through keenly studying the characteristics and attributes of my surroundings beyond merely the physical properties of selected subjects. I make mental notes of my observations or verbalize those momentary flashes by recording my “inspiration of the moment” in writing. These initial ideas materialize into conceptual imagery as the work progresses in the studio. I also regularly attend art conferences and follow contemporary art institutions and artists on social media platforms to keep up with current trends. Would you tell us something about your usual setup and process? My work process evolves continually with each developing work. I treat painting surfaces with primarily acrylic mediums and mixed media, often dense with collaged imagery and cutting-edge techniques. Rapid brushwork retains both the freshness of my thoughts and the materials. By layering intricately interwoven textural materials with iridescent acrylic paints rather than attached as top-layer collages, my work typically interacts with light in a unique way. I seek to create the illusion of the two-dimensional image visually extending beyond its boundaries, be Special Issue
Pulsating Rhythms, 2018. Acrylics and mixed media on canvas. 75" X 58"
ART Habens
Chitra Ramanathan
the surface a canvas, wood, metal, or
fleeting thoughts of the moment.
Plexiglas panel. I do not generally make corrections
We have really appreciated the way
because I want the work to reflect my
the vibrancy of thoughtful nuances
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Chitra Ramanathan
of your canvases create tension and
ART Habens
make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in an artwork and in particular, how do you develop a texture?
dynamics. How do you come about settling on your color palette? And how does your own psychological 21 4 12
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Chitra Ramanathan
Celebration
Joyful Musings
Acrylics and mixed media on canvas, 60" X 36"
Acrylics and mixed media on canvas, 60" X 36"
I have always been fascinated by the world outdoors. I grew up in a scenic area surrounded by a large lake, which was my favorite place to sketch during my childhood, and recall being fascinated by the interplay of color and texture on transparent bodies of water or solid, undulating greenery surrounding the
area. My recent works have also explored similar subject matter relating to nature, but as conceptual compositions. Beginning my career with exhibitions on Broadway, New York from 1995 , painted surfaces of translucent colors, but no definitive shapes â&#x20AC;&#x201C; just hints of forms dominated some pieces. In other
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Chitra Ramanathan
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Lyrical Profusion Acrylics and mixed media on canvas, 48" X 67"
Melodious Waves
and emotions tied to experiences there during subsequent visits that get integrated as metaphors into my work today.
Acrylics and mixed media on canvas, 60" X 36"
works, semi-transparent paint applications in some areas contrast with heavy doses of colors on others. Psychological make-up has played a prominent role in my work, mixing sensory experiences and feelings as reactions to my surroundings. Indeed, I stay connected with my roots in India, and meld memories
You are a versatile artist and you combine a wide variety of texture materials, including fabric, handmade papers and wood in order to pursue the brilliant threedimensional quality that marks out
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Chitra Ramanathan
your artworks. What properties that you are searching for in the materials that you include in your works? Because I am deeply interested in producing luminous surfaces to evoke cheerful feelings, I often choose vivid metallic colors or create interference with iridescent acrylic paint, so that the finished pieces glow under natural or artificial lighting. In my current abstract mixed-media paintings, textural materials are incorporated into the paint instead of attaching them to the topmost layer as a superficial collage. Instead, I vary pieces of fabric, thread, enamel, paper as carefully chosen found materials. I carefully research to find materials that are suitable for interacting with different paint properties. Fading, not just through exposure to direct light sunlight but by the fusion of incompatible materials is one of my prime concerns. As a result, I avoid materials that could disintegrate within the painting, leading to affecting the permanence of the artwork. And should a found material be an attractive consideration but does not meet my conservation criteria, I create a replica of what I have in mind such as self-made handmade paper or pieces of watercolor to fit a particular area or areas.
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We like the way your artworks, and in particular Euphoric and Exhilaration, accomplish the difficult task of visually portraying happiness: how important does everyday life’s experience – including your memories of India, where you grew up – play in your creative process? Could you mention a work that has been inspired by a particular experience? Yes, one important work that inspired me to choose a very large canvas was inspired by the cave paintings of India I meticulously chose a limited color palette, and it is one of my favorite pieces, presently in my personal collection. Following is a photo of the piece. We never stop searching for happiness, and I am humbled that people have found it in my paintings for so many years. “Euphoric” was acquired in 2016, whereas “Exhilaration” was sold at a local public auction the day it was completed in 2003. Neither painting obviously depicts something about India, but they are in fact inspired by the vivid colors of art forms in festivals and spiritual influences that are part of my background. While “Euphoric” is a
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ART Habens
moment becomes important. To that effect I work directly on my canvases, without making significant changes to my initial imagery.
spiritual interpretation of happiness, created while I was looking to fathom its deeper meaning, the presence of deliberate circular forms in “Exhilaration” allude to the belief in continual life cycle of birth and re-birth in Hindu mythology that represents the search for eternal bliss.
We like the way your artworks challenge the viewers' perceptual parameters and we daresay that your artistic practice seems to aim to look inside of what appear to be seen, rather than its surface, providing the spectatorship with freedom to realize its own perception. How important is for you to invite the viewers to elaborate personal meaning? And what do you hope that your audience take away from your artworks?
As a lighthearted approach with a more limited color palette, the motifs in the following painting are inspired by mandalas or “rangloli”, patterns with Indian motifs including paisleys, drawn on the floor on the many festive occasions in India, both as auspicious symbols as well as decorative icons. One such work was created by such inspiration titled “Mandala Dreams” and measuring 74.5” X 53.5"
I cannot help but aspire for my audiences to look beyond the surface level. The goal of my conceptual paintings is just that: encouraging people to look for or interpret imagery beyond basic physical characteristics such as form, line and color. These choices are influenced by different sources for me, be they historical or personal experiences, and I hope the audience also finds significant meaning at some level in them. Meeting those who attend my exhibition openings with questions has been such a pleasure as well as a learning experience for me, and I am happy that my conceptual works have been relatable to
Your works seem to convey the idea of spontaneity: do you paint instinctively, gesturally? Or do you rather methodically transpose geometric schemes from paper to canvas? Spontaneity is very important for me. Rapid gestural brushwork in executing my inspirations is key to emphasizing my concept of capturing ephemeral, fleeting moments. Instinct does play an important role too! Inspiration can be fleeting, and therefore, working on the thoughts of the 21 4 18
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ART Habens
Chitra Ramanathan
Mixed media with gold leaf on canvas, 3 feet X 5 feet. Private commission, Boston MA 2018
many online collectors as well. The internet has broadened and diversified the ways I try to relate to new audiences. In one instance, the MGM Resorts International organization commissioned a pair of large, signed paintings that have hung in the Special Issue
Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas since 2004. In 2008, an elementary school engaged me to create a mural onsite that was 14 feet wide and 4 feet tall â&#x20AC;&#x201C; where I chose to engage each child in the process, much to the delight of the commissioning authorities. 23 4 19
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created for the founder of a business in 2016. Following are photographs of those commissioned projects. As you have remarked once, among the most the Impressionist period and later Abstract Expressionism are your basic influences: what did address you to focus your artistic research on Conceptual Painting?
Others have asked for interpretations of their own expressions of happiness. One of these resulted in a three-paneled connectable triptych painting based on the flora in Claude Monetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s garden in Giverny, France that I
While certain periods of art history have served as the foundations for my work, I wish for my paintings to be an ongoing contemporary dialogue that would be relevant to present and future generations of art lovers. I am concurrently an art educator, and as such am aware that my role as a conceptual contemporary visual artist is as much about giving form to ideas and interpretations as knowing how to communicate about them. Artists as social interpreters have always been messengers and innovators of fresh ideas and actions. Speaking for myself, developing a unique perspective that extends beyond geographical boundaries into one that present-day audiences can relate to and enjoy is my hope and dream. The challenge of nurturing the appreciation and aesthetic appeal of a painting or print within a home as easily as in a public space inspires me to create new work. I would like to continue to offer my art as a relaxing, even therapeutic 21 4 14
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ART Habens
Chitra Ramanathan
outlet, and the reason for my future interest in creating art for the public realm as discussed later in this interview. Artist Lydia Dona once remarked that in order to make paintings today one has to reevaluate the conceptual language behind the mechanism of painting: are your works painted gesturally, instinctively? Or do you methodically transpose geometric schemes from paper to canvas? Inspiration, intuition, timeliness, and spontaneity have been the conceptual focus for much of my work. Whether on a large mural or a small piece, I work directly on my chosen surface with gestural, rapidly-executed brushwork to convey my most immediate thoughts. Even on my heavily collaged works, I do not spend much time in deliberation. When a piece does not speak effectively enough for me at a point, I save it for later or discard. However, in conceptual painting, working with and teaching others how to use a variety of media are only part of the process. It is my role as an artist to use materials and media in a manner that aids audiences in comprehending Special Issue
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Chitra Ramanathan
ART Habens
Oahu Dreams, 2018. Acrylics on wood panel. 12" X 9" 21 4 14
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ART Habens
Chitra Ramanathan
and thereby relating to an abstract piece even if it is entirely open to interpretation. Since 1995, when your paintings arrived on the art scene and various art galleries on Broadway, New York City invited you the artist to exhibit in solo and group exhibitions, your works have been extensively exhibited on several occasions and are now in lots of private and public collections: how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? And what do you hope your audience take away from your artworks?
almost personal! I hope that my numerous fans accrued over the years consider my art to be a source of dialogue, discussion, and inspiration. We have appreciated the originality of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Chitra. What projects are you currently working on and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future?
Looking forward, I hope to focus on public art as the next step in reaching large and diverse audiences. Currently a painting measuring 67â&#x20AC;? X 48â&#x20AC;? chosen by the Public Art Review Board of the Orange County Board of Committee Commissions of Central Florida as a loan exhibition is featured in Orlando, Florida. The Palo Alto California Public Art Commission, and the City of Tucson and Southern Arizona have selected me through publicart.org for inclusion in their pre-qualified artist pool for 2019/2020. I also strive to give back through mentorship Alongside continuing to teach painting partand feedback for aspiring artists, young and time, I plan to focus on corporate old, who contact me for support. While they commission invitations, seeking assignments both working individually or are an important audience to me, I have found that the relationship becomes mutual, within teams on large scale projects. I define my audience broadly. As an art educator who has taught classes and workshops in painting mediums including abstract art for over ten years, I have often conducted demos of my work at public venues that give large audiences a chance to meet and learn about my concept and materials. I am fortunate to receive appreciative feedback from audiences when teaching, on social media, and through invitations to exhibit, acquire, or collaborate on new works.
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Egression
Lives and works in Thessaloniki, Greece
Melpomeni has exhibited her artwork in various galleries in Edinburgh of Scotland (Talbot Rice Gallery, Embassy Gallery, Dok Artists space), in Alchemy Film and Moving image Festival, Hawick, UK and in Momus museum of Contemporary Art,Thessaloniki, Greece
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The sofa, 2018, Video Still 021 4
Melpomeni Gaganeli
ART Habens
video, 2013
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ART Habens
Melpomeni Gaganeli
Special IssueThe Tower and the summer, 2019 Photo Booth,
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An interview by and
, curator curator
Hello Melpomeni and welcome to ART Habens. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and after having earned your Bachelor Degree in Italian Literature and Language from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, you moved to the United Kingdom to nurture your education with a Master of Arts in Contemporary Art Practices , that you received from the University of Edinburgh: how did those formative years influence your evolution as an artist? In particular, how does your cultural substratum due to your Greek roots direct the trajectory of your current artistic research?
Melpomeni Gaganeli
degree I had the impulsion to continue my studies in the field of art practice, because to my mind, art is a visual combination of code elements similar to syntax. Also,my knowledge of the cultural context on the historic development in the
Through my Literature and Language studies not only I have realized the role of creating a meaning but also I have understand my sensitivity to the power of all the forms of languages. After my first
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ART Habens
Melpomeni Gaganeli
wider world ,helped me grasp and made me wonder about the synchronic reality and current history, trying to put in my art modern questions. Well, I don’t think that my Greek “roots” has influenced my art production, but surely the contemporary historical fact that Greek economy could have benefited from Europe but instead the whole structure was left to collapse and to create a domino effect,has stimulated my artistic response as a creative thinker. This has prompted me to be concerned about the significant relationship between cause and effect.I reckon that I should give a deep and broad glance ,even with humor, seeking the bended truth about the political,financial and even more the humanitarian crisis of Europe that gradually became global and understanding how this affects our aftermath behavior and our personal reality. You are a versatile artist and before starting to elaborate about your artistic production, we would invite to our readers to visit https://melpomenigaganeli.weebly.com in order to get a synoptic idea about your artistic production: would you
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The sofa, 2018, Video Still
tell us something about your usual setup and process? In particular, what are your mai sources of inspiration?
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Melpomeni Gaganeli
We live in such a fast paced environment as fast internet, running political occurrence,uber
ART Habens
information,fast food life, massive surveillance,target marketing etc.This anxious speed of post
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ART Habens
Melpomeni Gaganeli
The sofa, 2018, Video Still
capitalism along with my full awareness of the acceleration of the things and my struggle to adapt to
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it,are the facts that inspires my work. The stress of feeling trapped in an accelerant system gives me a
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Melpomeni Gaganeli
ART Habens
my first conceptualized idea of my art production. For this special edition of ART Habens we have selected The Sofa, an interesting experimental video that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/308757930. Whit its stimulating inquiry into the psychopathology of contemporary identity, what has at once impressed us of this captivating artwork is the way it provides the viewers with such a multilayered visual experience, capable of challenging their perceptual parameters. When walking our readers through the genesis of The Sofa, would you tell us how did you develop the initial idea? It all started just observing myself wasting my time on social media and i was shocked.The next day i had deleted all my social media accounts! I was wondering what we are all doing..we all have multi selves ,digital selves with different behaviors, different actions and
sensation that there is no past or history to be recorded. Usually, this perception of fast driving generates
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The sofa, 2018, Video Still
ART Habens
Melpomeni Gaganeli
sometimes different sexualities or mentality. We are trying to communicate but instead we get in touch less and less becoming someone else unconsciously and sometimes we impersonate fake personalities with the anxiety to be acceptable or competitive. Internet marks our identity more than tradition,history or external life. My experimental video â&#x20AC;&#x153;The sofaâ&#x20AC;? was an attempt to describe all this eccentric behavior and to depict that the human being today has a whole new state of mind and multi faced identities via internet as similar as the complicated nature of the web. A work of art can be considered a combination between understanding reality and hinting at the unknown: how does everyday life's experience and your surroundings fuel your creative process? And how do you think your works respond to it in finding hidden, crystallised moments in the everyday?
The sofa, 2018, Video Still
can see and perceive as reality and the unknown world that could be expressible, which once it becomes flesh
For me there are two kind of worlds,the everyday world that you
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Melpomeni Gaganeli
ART Habens
something irrelevant in daily life and
itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s already a known and real essence. I usually donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t limit or crystallize a moment but sometimes I am noticing
following a logical induction, an integrated idea generates without
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ART Habens
Melpomeni Gaganeli
The sofa, 2018, Video Still
evenremembering the original stimulus.
the way you combine found footage to create videos marked out with
We have particularly appreciated
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compelling narrative drive.
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Melpomeni Gaganeli
ART Habens
between straight and manipulated images is increasingly blurry. How do you consider the role of digital manipulation in video in order to offer an augmented visual experience? I think that digital manipulation in video is like the remix of sounds for a D.J or like the data type for a computer programmer. When I post produce a ready made image or combine real TV, youtube or journalistic captures, my working purpose is to break and recycle the initial meaning ,manipulating it in a different performative way of semiotics,aesthetics and language, in order to narrate my own perception ,reexamine it and insert it into new context. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s my response to the chaotic labyrinth of information and images provided in the contemporary world,making use of these data and forms as a base material of a new construction of art. Another interesting work of yours that has particularly impressed and that we would like to introduce to our readers is entitled The story of King Libayovski and his curse and
Manipulation in visual arts is not new, but digital technology has extended the range of possibilities and the line
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The Story of King Libayovski, 2017, Video Still
ART Habens
Melpomeni Gaganeli
can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/216367747. Questioning the dichotomy between the real and the digital, your work seems to invite the viewers to look inside of what appear to be seen, rather than its surface, providing the spectatorship with freedom to realize their own perception. How important is for you to invite the viewers to elaborate personal interpretations? And in particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? In my art there is always a basic statement and a specific intention that faces straightly and seeks to interact with the audience but I want a completed work that has found its purpose to be independent and distant of me. I am letting an open space for personal explanation and translation and in this space is where interpretation happens and where viewer creates its own experience. The gap that I release my control to the audienceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s filter is the thing that satisfies me the most.
The Story of King Libayovski, 2017, Video Still
viewed at https://vimeo.com/240462647 weave such an effective socio political
Your artworks, and in particular democracy is to blame, that can be
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Melpomeni Gaganeli
criticism, to question a wide variety of themes in which you conveying an unapologetic critique of post-
ART Habens
capitalism culture, including massive surveillance, hyperinformation as well as global crisis
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ART Habens
Melpomeni Gaganeli
The Story of King Libayovski, 2017, Video Still
and unemployment. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, "artists's role differs depending on
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which part of the world theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re in. It depends on the political system they aree living under": does your artistic
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Melpomeni Gaganeli
ART Habens
our media driven and globalised contemporary age? In my opinion the political system is one and total all over the world. We live in a crucial period that there is no political stability or conversely a capitalistic system is well established even beyond leftists parties. The political apparatus of the elite is everywhere and in the mentioned video I want to emphasize its dysfunction and the inefficiency of the so called “democracy”. Its so ironic that the term democracy in greek means common people powered,and is sad that the point is opposed to the contemporary truth. Political events and revolutionary movements such as yellow jackets, Greek referendum of NO or Arabic Spring ,etc.. doesn’t seem to change anything. At this project I am trying to map the global landscape and its effects as an Universal structure and as an everyday life under random geographical variety. Even if it is difficult to describe world’s totality,it is important to point out that the role of an artist should not only be based on personal perspective, but should also make
research respond to a particular cultural moment? In particular, how do you consider the role of artists in
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ART Habens
Melpomeni Gaganeli
more visible the omnipresent and general background scene,placing it intelligently into the foreground ,as well as evaluating the global political path and bring it closer to the personaI actuality. It is hard to avoid that the personal is political and vice versa. The combination between sound and visuals plays a crucial role in your works and we have appreciated it provides the footage of democracy is to blame and of The Sofa with such an enigmatic and a bit unsettling atmosphere: as an artist particularly concerned in the connection between sound and moving images, how would you consider the role of sound within your practice and how do you see the relationship between sound and moving images? The use of sound in my videos itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mostly a tool of synchrony between reality and imagination but most of all an audioguide to lead the viewer in an awkward or whimsy environment ,in a way to enter in the experience. The intention is to give life and character to visual image, the sound/image composition act as a sound wave of narration. The synthesis of a movement with a rhythm animates an image that speaks to you and jumps out of real
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The Story of King Libayovski, 2017, Video Still
elements avoiding to imitate reality. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like questioning the existence of a moving image playing with its acoustic visuality.
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Melpomeni Gaganeli
For example, a flying candy that sounds like mosquito or a broken plate that screams gives a fanciful trait to the embodiment of the
ART Habens
image. So, is just an entry- level technique to narrate without using words and sometimes a way to blur the intent.
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ART Habens
Melpomeni Gaganeli
The Story of King Libayovski, 2017, Video Still
Over the years you have exhibited your artworks in various galleries in Scotland and in Greece, and you participated to a number of
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festivals, including Alchemy Film and Moving image Festival. We have really appreciated the originality of your artistic research
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Melpomeni Gaganeli
ART Habens
the issue of audience reception? And what do you hope your audience take away from your artworks? I hope my work is functioning as a channel of energy while I am giving a mirror to the viewer to be a witness of its own identity. Thanks for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Melpomeni. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? Thanks for the opportunity, it was my pleasure doing this interview. My aim for my future projects is to keep on searching the new material of our human and political contemporary identity construction.
and before leaving this conversation
This period I am working on a project for a video installation, exploring to give a 3D perception and bring out my work as a visual sculpture.
we would like to pose a question
An interview by
about the nature of the relationship
and
, curator curator
with your audience. Do you consider
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Lives and works in Bucharest, Romania
Invasion, 2014, oil on canvas, 46x61 cm
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Maria Bordeanu
ART Habens
video, 2013
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ART Habens
The Window, Special Issue2018, oil on canvas, 100x100 cm
Maria Bordeanu
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An interview by and
, curator curator
Hello Maria and welcome to ART Habens. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. After having graduated from â&#x20AC;&#x153;Nicolae Tonitzaâ&#x20AC;? Art Highschool, you enrolled the Bachelor of Arts program of Painting at the University of Art Bucharest, and after having graduated, you nurtured your education with a Master of Fine Arts, that you received from the same university: how did those formative years influence your evolution as an artist? In particular, how does you cultural substratum due to the influence of neoclassical artists, as well as your work as a photographer and 3D artist, direct the trajectory of your current artistic research?
Maria Bordeanu
Hello and thank you for the interest in my work! From the beginning I was drawn to figurative imagery, both in painting and other media. The university years were about experimenting, it was important for me to be in a context of teachers and colleagues being preoccupied by art, aesthetics, ideas. I saw different approaches and I also took various courses. During this time I wanted to improve my painting technique because I felt that would help me create the works
as I saw them. At the end of the four year study I settled on making several paintings which I reinterpreted as sequences from neoclassical works. It was a tridimensional approach of a shape and my painting technique felt liberated because it was adapted to reveal the details of hands, fabric and jewelry which had a certain decadence in them. The process of making something became important to me, hence my preference
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ART Habens
Maria Bordeanu
for photography which allows me to document places and ideas that would turn into projects. I am also influenced by paintings, movies and digital art and the way images are serialized and composed in order to achieve an impact. I also like the glossiness in a depiction and details that catch the eye. I learned 3D early on because I was very interested in it and the way I could make realistic images in a digital environment and it’s part of my daily work. It also brings a constant learning of tools and techniques and it has a variety of approaches, from sculpture to texture and camera knowledge. We have appreciated the way the results of your artistic inquiry convey such a coherent combination such an extremely high care to details and a rigorous aesthetics, and we would like to invite our readers to visit https://mariabordeanu.wordpress.com in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production: when walking our readers through your usual setup and process, we would like to ask you if you think that there is a central idea that connects all your works. There’s a “fragment of time” idea in my works, centering on an area from a larger background. Many of my paintings feature a zooming in on a detail or a scene, like establishing the focus for the viewer. This is inspired from movie framing and it serves the purpose of highlighting significant
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Rock habitat, 2015, oil on canvas, 45x80 cm
details. So far I investigated fragments of landscape where human intervention is implied, not featured. For some projects I wanted to have a significant relationship between the canvas frame and the painted theme.
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Maria Bordeanu
For this special edition of ART Habens we have selected Artificial Habitat, an interesting series that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What
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has at once caught our attention of this stimulating project, is the way it unveils the tension between artificial and natural elements, to challenge the viewers' perceptual parameters; in this sense,
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ART Habens
Maria Bordeanu
Outcrop Light, 2015, oil on canvas, 45x80 cm
your approach stimulates the viewerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s psyche and consequently works on both a subconscious and a conscious level. How did you develop the initial idea for Artificial Habitat, and what were your
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initial sources of inspiration? The inspiration for Artificial Habitat came after visiting a Canadian biodome, where I was fascinated by the ecosystem created
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Maria Bordeanu
ART Habens
entertained visitor/observer of an ideal nature. The artificial rocks and plants gave the impression of a diorama and there was also an intense heat which felt like a tropical simulation. I documented this experience through a series of photographs which I later edited and adjusted to make the starting point for the Artificial Habitat series. I wanted to preserve many elements from the original space, while adding the pipes invading the landscape which show a world under construction or in the midst of decay, which lends to its need of preservation. There is also a dystopian feeling when looking at the fragments of nature and the question: is man cultivating them for the pleasure of viewing or because they are nearly extinct? There was also a particular image that stuck with me: that of a water area touching the walls painted with clouds and sky, where the transition was showing imperfections. It felt like a sci-fi moment, like looking at the edge of a world. We have really appreciated the vibrancy of the nuances that marks out your paintings, and we like the way they create such a powerful narrative drive from the details that you sapiently select. How did you come about settling on your color palette? And how much does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in a specific artwork and in
in a constrained environment, with a great variety of flora and fauna. This was the first impression I had of surveillance, it felt like a constantly monitored world where I was in the place of the
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Mirror, (detail) 60x100cm, 2015
ART Habens
Maria Bordeanu
Light habitat, 2015, oil on canvas, 60x140 cm
particular, how do you develop a
nature immersed in fog, in a way that
texture?
would enhance its artificial appearance. I usually work with multiple shades of
In this series I wanted to depict a lush
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green, ochres and dark reds. Here the
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Maria Bordeanu
ART Habens
warm colours are mostly used to represent
them in semi-opaque backgrounds to
the industrial intervention and the rock
establish the undertone. This way I
structure, in the form of pipes with a feeling
already have a setting in place when I
of rust. I tend towards warmer colors, using
continue painting and I develop a texture
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Tropical, (detail) 60x100 cm, 2014
ART Habens
Maria Bordeanu
The Display, 48x96 cm, 2015
through layering, with thicker strokes
In your Artificial Habitat series, the lush
where the light falls on the shapes.
vegetation reveals a hidden world of
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Maria Bordeanu
ART Habens
pipes and structures which merge with
your artistic practice seems to aim to
the leaves and trees: we daresay that
look inside of what appear to be seen,
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ART Habens
Maria Bordeanu
Water, 2016, oil on canvas, 48x96 cm
rather than its surface, providing the spectatorship with freedom to realize their own perception. How important is for you
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to invite the viewers to elaborate personal meaning? How open would you like your works to be understood?
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Maria Bordeanu
I expect the works to be open to interpretation, it is a staged world. Here are fragments of landscape constructed
ART Habens
like a set, the viewer can imagine if there is a preserved forest in a controlled environment or an invasion of structures.
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Interior 1, 2015, oil on canvas, 90x140 cm
ART Habens
Maria Bordeanu
I wanted to convey a feeling first, of a very dense vegetation filled with details. It invites the viewer to see things happening inside the canvas, like smoke slowly rising, that will change the scene beyond what we see in the present. I liked this contrast between artificial and natural elements, an image suspended in time that creates a sense of unease. We can recognize a subtle, still effective socio political criticism in your artworks, and we have really appreciated the way you gently invite the viewers to question the contradictions that affect our contemporary society: Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco once stated, "artists's role differs depending on which part of the world theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re in. It depends on the political system they aree living under": do you think that your artistic research responds to a particular cultural moment? And how do you consider the role of artists in our globalised and media driven contemporary age? Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a new wave of painters working within a Realist tradition. Figurative painting implies a certain slowness and reflection and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s important in a world that is over-saturated with images and social media content. Even if it sometimes starts with digital processing, painting is always an evolving process, freeing itself from its origins through brushstrokes that transform the image and make it have a rythm of its own. In this sense, I consider
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Ceiling 1, 2016, oil on canvas, 60x120 cm
the role of artist to be an important one, each image or object is unique because there is a choice behind it and it invites to discussion. By making a static image I aim to engage the viewer more, in a media driven culture that is concerned with appearences. The microclimate in the artificial habitat
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Maria Bordeanu
project raises a question about what is still natural and what is replicated in the world around us. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also more awareness about climate change and the impact of man on environment, something I also wanted to imply in my works.
ART Habens
age, Interiors and Ceilings has drawn heavily from the specifics of its locations: the ambience doesn't play the mere role of a mere background: how did you select the locations and the details to be represented, in order to achieve such a brilliant result? In particular, how do you consider the relationship between
Reflecting your interest towards baroque
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ART Habens
Maria Bordeanu
Ceiling 2, 2016, oil on canvas, 60x120 cm
Photography and your work as a painter?
Through the camera, I look for shapes and compositions that would become a base for paintings. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s exciting to make sequences of places and people and an idea forms when I see a photographed project as a whole. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m also interested in the aesthetic quality of the images and to discover ways I can make them
Traveling is a source of inspiration for me and I always document locations and buildings where I can imagine a story. There is a rich layer of history in the trompe-l-oeil depictions which I filter through a contemporary approach.
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Maria Bordeanu
ART Habens
viewer is always impressed by them but they must be seen from a distance. Painting them on canvas, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a new experience of watching the ceilings, rather than having them above. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an act of bringing them closer. The interiors immersed in water resemble venetian buildings under flood. The tone is subdued here and it is a nod to a reality where water levels rise and buildings slowly decay. I see it as memories from the past integrated in a slightly dystopian narrative. A work of art can be considered a combination between understanding reality and hinting at the unknown: how does your experience and surroundings fuel your creative process? And how do you think your works respond to it in finding hidden, crystallised moments? Most of my work is fueled by journeys and by looking for inspiration in different artistic forms, movies and books. In this sense, everyday experiences have had a lesser impact so far. I always approach a new place with fresh eyes, as a story unfolding, and once I am there I start to imagine a way I could arrange the pieces together. While traveling or discovering something new doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t happen very often, it has a feeling of singularity and a desire to see things that I might turn into a project. The preference for a certain kind of image is of course filtered by
meaningful. And then painting creates something new because it is a constantly changing process that frees itself from the boundaries of photography. The baroque inspired ceilings bring a different point of view and I wanted to investigate their psychological impact, the
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Interior 2, 2015, oil on canvas, 90x140 cm
ART Habens
Maria Bordeanu
Zabriskie Point, 60x140 cm, 2015
isolating them from a larger scene.
pictures that surround us and how looking at them makes us feel. While I take different directions, my work is centered around a similar concept, that of finding details and moments out of time, and give them a greater significance by
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Another interesting project of yours that we couldn't do without mentioning is entitled Zabriskie Point and is inspired from Michelangelo Antonioni's
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Maria Bordeanu
masterpiece: we have particularly appreciated the way you have successfully accomplished the difficult task of freeing the images from their cinematographic origin to provide them with such an autonomous combination
ART Habens
between rhythm and aesthetics. How did you come up to the idea of creating a painting out of the frames of a film? The explosion at the end of the film takes place in the characterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s imagination and it
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ART Habens
Maria Bordeanu
Zabriskie Point, 60x140 cm, 2015
makes sense visually because it contains elements of rebellion and freedom. The fact that it has a dreamy quality and slow motion was what inspired me to paint the movie frames. The selection I made was from a cinematic perspective, which is a
Summer 2015 Special Issue
narrative point of view meant to simulate the experience of watching a movie. Every canvas is part of a sequence, a symbolic deconstruction of the explosion at the end of the film. I also wanted to
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Maria Bordeanu
show the place before the destruction, focusing on household objects. The explosion itself is mostly smoke but I approached it like depicting an installation, I wanted to give it a more substantial form through painting.For
ART Habens
this and other projects I used a canvas close to the 2.39:1 aspect ratio, which is a current format for anamorphic widescreen theatrical viewings. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a personal take on it while also maintaining the movie frame.
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ART Habens
Maria Bordeanu
Zabriskie Point, 60x140 cm, 2015
Over the years your artworks have been showcased in a number of group and personal exhibition, including your solo shows in Bucharest: “The Final Scene” at 418Gallery and "Artificial Habitat” at Arthol2. How do you consider the nature
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of your relationship with your audience? And what do you hope your audience take away from your artworks? I wish to present the audience with an interpretation of a familiar reality. When
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Maria Bordeanu
taking things out of context, you can draw attention to them and subtly change peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perception. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s why I like to take places we know and give them a different significance, a new scenario, like in the case of plants and buildings faced
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with invasion or extinction. There is usually a close crop, leaving the viewer to imagine what lies beyond the canvas. Each space turns into a microclimate the way I see it, it can invite to reflection on the fragility of things. The abundance of details
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ART Habens
Maria Bordeanu
Porcelain 1, 2012, oil on canvas, 24x48 cm
sometimes turns them into fictional museum displays.
relationship with a place that is isolated in time, close to the moment of change.
So I hope the audience would develop a
We have really appreciated the
SummerIssue 2015 Special
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Maria Bordeanu
ART Habens
multifaceted nature of your artistic
sharing your thoughts, Maria. What
research and before leaving this
projects are you currently working on, and
stimulating conversation we would like to
what are some of the ideas that you hope
thank you for chatting with us and for
to explore in the future?
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ART Habens
Maria Bordeanu
Porcelain 2, 2012, oil on canvas, 24x48 cm
I really enjoyed answering, it was a very
and I work on paintings created like
interesting introspection and revisiting of
windows.
projects for me! I'm currently preparing a new exhibition
Summer 2015 Special Issue
My aim is to further deconstruct the reality
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Maria Bordeanu
ART Habens
and propose alternate versions of it within
stillness in them and I work more with the
the same canvas.
square, which has a static balance. I could say I am searching for a different layer beyond
I still prefer images that have a certain
places and things we already know.
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Charade Special Issue
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Agnes Durbet-Giono
ART Habens
video, 2013
422 0
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ART Habens
Special Issue Backbone
Agnes Durbet-Giono
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Can you tell us something about your beginnings as an artist? What motivated you to pursue artistic career, how and when did it all start? I always was resistant to any formation or qualification since an early age. I was never able to conform to what was expected and teachers were mere shadows who had little influence on my life. I started to take pictures after my introduction to the industrial word where I feel at ease. Who are your biggest influences; people, movements, styles you looked upon while establishing your visual language?
Agnes Durbet-Giono
I had a fascination with the Italian renaissance, the classical Greek statues from the most primitive to the Roman invasions.
Symbolism is key. Story telling as well. Mythology, paganism, witch hunt were part of my reality all my life.
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Forbidden
ART Habens
Agnes Durbet-Giono
I absolutely adored the neo classics and the romantics, the way they pushed the body to extreme unrealistic excess, the portraiture of humanity in total luxuriance. I love the hidden treasures of the primitive and their false uncomplicated aspects. I love flesh and metal, wood and concrete as well as all mineral textures. How would you describe your style in terms of techniques, mediums, materials you use etc.? What are those specific features that make your work unique and original? Maybe I should tell you more about what I am not. I am not a photographer, nor a technical wiz. I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t pretend to be a specialist in anything. I do not search for reality or to be the witness of some beautiful
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Agnes Durbet-Giono
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ART Habens
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ART Habens
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Agnes Durbet-Giono
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Agnes Durbet-Giono
ART Habens
scenery, historical event and political moment. I do not want to accuse, aggress. I use all medium in my possession and capacity to translate a feeling a vision even futile of the magic haunting my daily lifeâ&#x20AC;Śmy own reality. How does your creative process look? I sense presences while working in a world haunted by masculinity, virility. I see ghosts and after taking pictures of sewages treatment plants, water filtrations system, factories etc. I over impose their silhouettes What is your greatest inspiration? LOVE What are the themes you usually tackle in your work and
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Forbidden
ART Habens
Agnes Durbet-Giono
why are they of particular interest to you? I work with only men. I am very physical in my job. I usually work with 2 contrasting images to question the overrated perception of what society see as beautiful and ugly. I try to balance feminine and masculinity. Which project, exhibition, artwork etc. do you find most significant in your work so far? Can you single out some important milestones in your career? All my exhibits in Sydney and in France were important and all of them personal milestones. The public, their feedback is important but creating is something I would do no matter how.
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Agnes Durbet-Giono
ART Habens
Murailles Celestes 21 4 10
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Tunnel Vision
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Agnes Durbet-Giono
Sinfeud Special Issue
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Agnes Durbet-Giono
ART Habens
What are the messages you’re trying to send to the viewers and what are the responses (feelings, questions, thoughts…) you hope to provoke? See further, don’t think reality is what is fed to you by the media, go inside fetch all these feelings you were meant to explore, the painful and the pure pleasure. Dance with all the demons and angels hidden in all the rays of light and the dark places. Breathe the contrasts and live as you can possibly love with all this passion that mold us into flesh. Don’t believe global reality at least for short laps of your life, one breath at the time. In changing yourself you can improve way more than you think in this world. What are your plans for the future (this year and in general)?
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Sixteen
ART Habens
Agnes Durbet-Giono
Sixteen
Write more love letters through
Enjoy Hades kingdom, the
drawings, photographs and
underground palace under
words.
Sydney.
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Lives and works in Basel, Switzerland
Anna Tereshina at her studio in Basel, Switzerland Photo by Alina Chistova Photography www.alinachistova.com
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Anna Tereshina
ART Habens
video, 2013
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Breaking the dawn, 2018. Mixed media on canvas Special Issue
Anna Tereshina
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An interview by and
, curator curator
Hello Anna and welcome to ART Habens. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background: over the years you always nurtured your passion for Fine Arts, and after having settled in Switzerland, you decided to continue your artistic education at the prestigious Basel School of Design: how did these formative years influence your evolution as an artist? In particular, prior to turning back to Fine Arts, you worked as a graphic designer and freelance photographer. What made you decide to switch careers? For me it’s been always literally a torture: obligation to choose only one creative path. Not because I didn’t know what I want, but completely opposite: I’ve always been interested to make visual arts, if speaking of photography or graphic design, crafts and hand-made or fine arts. I think, nowadays it’s such a pity that the artist should choose only one path. I mean, take a look at any book about being successful as an artist or illustrator and you’ll see the first tip: choose your style and keep the works consistent. Well, of course, consistency is a key. But in my opinion, it’s unfair. What if I have more creativity than it can be impressed in one technique? What if I think about genial artists of the past, such as Da Vinci? Or Picasso - just look at his story, how many styles he tried, how many techniques! Can you imagine young Picasso going to art’s consulting and receiving a tip «please stuck to one style and you’re going to be successful»? Nonsense. But nowadays it’s a usual story. I’ve been pushed
Anna Tereshina Photo by Alina Chistova Photography www.alinachistova.com
by society to choose one path and suffered because of it. For example, already for 10 years I’m working as a graphic designer - not only because of stabile day job, but also because I love it. A little different story with photography - last
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ART Habens
Anna Tereshina
Succulent garden, 2018
Velvet forest, 2018
Acrylic on canvas
Acrylic on canvas
year I’ve got a burnout because of too many commercial projects - I’ve always been putting all my energy in the process. I’ve kept the number of such projects low, because it’s an artistic process as well, I couldn’t turn it into the business pure, it’s much more than that. That’s why now I’m taking a break with commercial photography, to charge my «photo-batteries» and to keep my eye as fresh as possible. With fine arts it’s a bit different it’s always been a passion and a soul healing
process. Painting is a way of self-finding and expressing my ideas. After years at art school I was experienced to paint realistic - as close to nature as possible. But I always wanted more. Basel School of Design helped me to spread my horizons and try new techniques, as well as to get know other artists and to share our experience. Then after a long process of researching, collecting visual experiences and creating my own world of inspiration, I’ve finally felt free enough to
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Apple garden, 2018 Acrylic on canvas
Waves, 2018 Acrylic on canvas
Anna Tereshina
ART Habens
Colibrious, 2018
Wisdom in there (Snake Nr. 1), 2018
Acrylic on canvas
Acrylic on canvas
start creating abstract pieces. But the truth is everything I make, is actually by default «my style». From graphic design I’m creating for a company and illustrations I made for a children’s book, to any artwork I’m creating for myself or as a commission.
perception: we would like to invite our readers to visit http://www.annatereshina.com in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production: when walking our readers through your usual setup and process, we would like to ask you if you think that there is a central idea that connects all of your work as an artist.
We have appreciated the way the results of your artistic inquiry convey a coherent combination between intuition and rigorous aesthetics to question the theme of human
Any idea that comes to my mind should grow and ripe somehow. I usually write all the ideas
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ART Habens
Anna Tereshina
Blue orchid, 2018
Flamingo unicorn 2018
Acrylic on canvas
Acrylic on canvas
down to one of my numerous notebooks or sketch it. That way, I’m creating a library of ideas, that I can use any moment if I have time to spend couple of hours for painting or any other technique. This particular idea can come from anything possible - from a book read, movie watched to just a color combination seen on the street or in the forest while walking. Many paintings I’ve created started with a mood while traveling. It’s not only about the colors, it’s also the light captured
with my eyes, the smell of flowers of fresh baken bread, even a distressed plaster on the wall. I’m happy that I can capture this moment and freeze it in time with my art. Like a photo, not realistic, but delicately formed by my brain and heart into a visual artwork.
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The body of works that we have selected for this special edition of ART Habens and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article
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Paradise bird, summer 2018 Acrylic on canvas
Listen to the wind 2018 Acrylic on canvas
Anna Tereshina
ART Habens
On the coast 2018
Can you hear the nightingale? 2018
Acrylic on canvas
Acrylic on canvas
has at once captured our attention for the way you sapiently combined delicate tones with abstract feeling, as in the interesting Breaking the Dawn, a captivating artwork that as at once impressed for the way it communicates joyful sensation: would you tell us your sources of inspiration? How did you conceived this interesting work?
intuition as my main instrument, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s literally an intimate process of communication between my rational decisions and sudden impulsive happy mistakes. Suddenly Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve seen a form of a ship floating between seascape and pink light rays from a sun rising. This artwork somehow was inspired by wonderful masterpieces by J. M. W. Turner and early impressionism. Love how artists of this period delicately used the colors and textures.
This piece started as a color combination, sketched on my palette. While bringing the first brush strokes on a canvas, I felt it has potential in the form. When I mean that I use
We have really appreciated the vibrancy of thoughtful nuances of your canvas, and we
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ART Habens
Anna Tereshina
Gelato series, 1-2-3. Acrylic on wooden board
the nuances of tones that you decide to include in an artwork and in particular, how do you develope a texture?
like the way Succulent Garden and Velvet Forest show that vivacious tones are not strictly indespensable to create tension and dynamics. How did you come about settling on your color palette? And how much does your own psychological make-up determine
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Of course any work of any artist mostly contain our own choices. If you take a look at
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Anna Tereshina
ART Habens
career. I think, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a natural process of choosing your favorite palette, if speaking of art or lifestyle and even your outfits. I also love to use black and white to settle the contrast - but I always try not using them straight from the tube, but mix my own tone
my preferences in a color palette - I use lots of natural earthy tones, such as browns/grays/greens. Also blue and pink are my go-to colors. You almost canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t find purples and lots of red in my artworks, nevertheless I used to paint lots of red artworks earlier in my
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ART Habens
Anna Tereshina
Clouds over the B-city, 2018. Mixed media on canvas
Frozen in time, 2018. Mixed media on canvas
that fits particular artwork. When thinking about the texture - of course, my artworks are paintings, which makes them 2D-works, but I’m always trying to give them more depth and volumes, both using colors and textures. Sometimes I use my older pieces as a underpaint, which makes texture more interesting. My favorite inspiration of using texture in painting is Willem de Kooning, who’s the king of textured canvases for me.
current travels as well as your memories of the Finnish Bay where you grew ― play in your creative process? Could mention a work that has been inspired by a particular experience? Cherry Blossom painting is obviously inspired by spring gardens in Basel, where I live, and the Paradise Bird is a summer edition of «the seasons» series, has been painted impressed by our Bali trip.
Intuition is at the basis of your creative process and as you have remarked in your artist's statement, natural world is your main source of inspiration: how importance does everyday life's experience ― including your
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I don’t really remember a lot of visual images from my early childhood, more like colorful spots: heather bushes, cold wind on the bay or light rays coming through pine twigs.
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Anna Tereshina
ART Habens
I can see the space in you, 2018. Mixed media on canvas 21 4 16
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ART Habens
Anna Tereshina
Spring, 2018. Mixed media on canvas
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Anna Tereshina
ART Habens
Where the stars are born, 2018. Mixed media on canvas
Cotton candy clouds, 2018. Mixed media on canvas
We like the way Listen to The Wind and Waves convey the idea of movement: we daresay that your artistic practice seems to aim to look inside of what appear to be seen, rather than its surface, providing the spectatorship with freedom to realize their own perception. How important is for you to invite the viewers to elaborate personal meaning? And what do you hope that your audience take away from your artworks?
only a painted photo of something realistic, but the feeling. What do you think about when watching the waves on the coast? How does it touch your soul? What do you feel when the warm summer wind plays with your hair? It’s all about the question, not the answer. That’s why I love to work abstract. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some of your paintings have a more figurative feature, as Cherry Blossom, Paradise Bird and Apple Trees: how would
That’s exactly what I want viewers to experience - not the exact moment in time, not
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ART Habens
Anna Tereshina
Midnight garden, 2018. Mixed media on canvas
Snow leopard, 2018. Mixed media on canvas
you consuder the relationship between abstraction and figurative in your practice? In particular, how does representation and a tendency towards abstraction find their balance in your work?
Sometimes I just have more figurative images in my head that waiting to be revealed and expressed. Sometimes it’s about that feeling of being mighty enough to give life to some fantasy creature - to bring it on canvas or paper.
Like almost every decision, it’s only a question of mood. I percept art process as something really personal, even selfish somehow - it’s the only egoistic kind of decision I tend to make in my everyday life.
Another body of work that we would like to mention is the triptych Gelato: how do would you tell us something about the genesis of this interesting project? In particular, why did you conceived is a triptych and not as a single canvas?
Here nothing has more weight or authority than my own feelings and current mood.
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Dreaming of L. 2018. Mixed media on canvas
Anna Tereshina at her studio in Basel, Switzerland Photo by Alina Chistova Photography www.alinachistova.com
Anna Tereshina
These three pieces are actually purely inspired by my trip to Venice and Lido (an island nearby). I’ve been amazingly obsessed by color combinations seen on Venice’s streets. The famous dusty pink color, as well as «venetian red», known as one of the popular paint names made me feel inspired and immediately after I’ve started this triptych.
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always bringing home new materials or find some new brands to try. As an artist, I also want to support unknown brands - nowadays it’s hard time for small companies to survive. As for choosing a particular medium for a new work - I’m starting usually with sketching with a very soft pencil or charcoal, or a light underpaint. When the voice of the work getting louder, it’s usually self-evident, what should I use. Lately I worked a lot with acrylic paints, as I paint very impulsive and it dries quickly, which gives me an opportunity to paint fast and use many layers. I am also a really fast painter.
You artworks often include elements rich of symbolic elements and references to the realm of imagination, as in Wisdom In There Snake and Flamingo Unicorn: would you tell us something about the importance of symbols and reminders to the dream-like dimension in your imagery?
We have appreciated the originality of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Anna. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future?
I am desperately searching for the best way to express my fantasy world to everyone who’s following my creative way. It’s not that much about the different styles, but the whole world of my inner life. Try to imagine a map of a fantasy world: on the North you’ll find a See of Beasts, on the South - walk into a magic garden, full of blossoms. If you are brave enough to step into a forest of symbols and abstract meaning, you’ll find another side of being alive in this world.
Thank you too, it’s been an unforgettable experience - every talk or interview helps me as an artist to understand my style and working process better - and in future get it more efficient and inspiring for other, I hope. Currently I’m working on a series of paintings inspired by Swiss Alps and trying to find a perfect combination of styles - not too realistic, not too abstract. It’s an interesting challenge and three of smaller paintings are already done. I’m also thinking of a new art book project for 2019 - it helps to stay fit creatively and is a wonderful way to keep all the ideas at one place.
You are a versatile artist and you practice involves lots of mediums, including canvas and paper, using acrylics, watercolor, gouache, oil paint, many types of pastels and color pencils: what does attract you of such a wide variey of mediums? And how do you select a particular medium in order to create your works? Like every other progress, painting for me is a continuous self-educational process. I’m steadily trying to research and create new medium combinations, new textures and visual effects. And just because I’m a huge fan of any artist supply - while traveling, I’m
An interview by and
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, curator curator
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