How do you feel when you are painting? As I paint, my role as an artist shifts and alternates in subtle yet dramatic ways. When painting a botanical scene, I shift from a botanist to an architect, studying how petals layer thickly over one another to create a beautiful canopy gathered on top of a thin stem, balanced gracefully. You have to know the origin of a plant to fully appreciate its beauty and the more you learn about it, the easier your hands move to reproduce its natural expressions on canvas, since representing nature in paintings comes partly from understanding how flowers and plants develop in their surroundings and what they are trying to accomplish by growing or blooming just so. I become a kind of gemologist when I study the colour, form, and texture of precious stones, which have also been a source of inspiration to my paintings; or I can become a marine biologist, reading about the depth of an ocean, the structure of corals, and the formation of sand dunes and ripples underwater.
My passion for beauty and Art is what compels me to read, study, create, and travel. Appreciation is what makes us move around the world with a sense of love and purpose.
What is your Artistic Technique & Style?
I value the spontaneity and improvisation of the Abstract technique. The immediacy and freshness of this style, as well as its complexity and boldness, have always intrigued me. My personal achievement is employing radically different techniques to express different ideas, adapting form to fit expression. Selections of my artwork could be described as an amalgamation of painting, layering, and sculpting. I consider the aspects of each inseparable and interdependent— the process of building and carving being one. It is important for me to use techniques of great artists but not necessarily to emulate their paintings or approaches specifically— rather, to create a unique identity and style from the whole breadth of possibilities.
SPRING 2018
Perle 71