I became inspired and encouraged to start painting in 2019, following the completion of a creativity workshop based on the premise that if one has a long-held desire, dream or instinctive push to do something, it is most likely a nudge from the universe that needs to be explored.
Prior to that time, I had experienced great difficulty expressing myself through art. After taking the workshop, I felt the freedom and encouragement to start painting. I believe my art is an expression of those feelings of freedom, openness and fun! My medium is acrylics and I describe my art as expressive, intuitive, unique, bold, and colorful.
In some ways, I feel that I do not do the art, the art does me! I am usually quite amused and surprised by the finished painting! I know that my art work is an expression of my life experiences, desires and dreams. When thinking about the viewers of my art, I imagine them standing there, being intrigued, heads cocked to one side, thinking,” wow, what is this all about?”
As a self- taught artist, in my seventies, my wish is to inspire and encourage others to open up to their creative selves and express their gifts.
Boneface | Acrylic on paper | 14 x 11Chums | Acrylic on paper | 14 x 11Dancing Girl | Acrylic on paper | 14 x 11Sunfaces | Acrylic on paper | 14 x 11
Congrats to all the Artists who made it into issue four and thank you to everyone who submitted art for consideration. We had a name change, but we still have the same great art.
Check back in about a week or so for a new call for art.
European Visual Artist Mj Tom chooses not to share any personal information. Since 2003 he established the Visual Poetry | Urban Art Group LosOtros with his alter ego Andrea Nada. He lives between Berlin, Barcelona and Paris.
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His work has been exhibited at London, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Barcelona.
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His current body of work includes mixed media, collage, sculture, installation, and digital printing. Irreverent and fleeting, able to define himself as a copy machine of art, sarcastic and deliberately anonymous, he questions almost every probable
fact. The veneer of normality, the history as written, the common way of understanding nature and oneself as a part of it.
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As he remarks “I don’t want much to be known “about me”. I am not trying to be elusive as some people might say. I just think what is important is the artwork, not the artist. I want you to have my work on your …wall, not based on who I am, where I have studied or where I have exhibited my work. I don’t want to get between “You” and the “Artwork”. I want to live quietly behind it… and pass away sometime quietly…”
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Adding that “We are low value with high purpose. We are dedicated to noneducational activities, self-indulgent thoughts, unfinished and incomplete actions. Our work is not easily classified or marketable. This protects us from analysis, judgment or criticism. We have no direction, motivation other than a cursed reflex to purge our anonymous mental overflows in a public forum and then run away from it and hide behind our cloak of concealment. Art is simply our lifestyle.”.
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[Curriculum Vitae on My Own Words] or There is no Reality | Until You Create One.
Art is my way to conciliate with reality. In some cases, I can bring it closer to my standards. And psychoanalysis too. Both of them are hopeless. It is a try to put an order in the hectic world around and inside me. To value better what had happened and possibly what is happening, at least a part of it. It is a lost war. Before I can understand what had happened in reality, or at least what I perceive as reality, the latter flips and turns to something else. I ‘m a witness, an eye witness. I revise meticulously what it is
around me. I examine, select, collect, put in order emotions. Stating what is important and what is not, what could be regarded as beautiful, or ugly, what would be funny or sad. If I can’t change it, I can barely transform it, good enough in order to compromise with it. Sometimes the attempt is successful, sometimes it isn’t. I ‘m urban. I like nature but I feel comfortable only in the city. It is my battlefield. Especially, the afterhours, when everybody sleeps so I can walk quietly in the streets and hear the sounds. My paints they are made for me, but in reality they refer to others. It is an attempt; to speak enough for me but not in a verbal way. What is entitled inside the frame, presuppose my aesthetic viewpoint. But what they produce is beyond my control. I exist in both of them. It is a miracle, when it happens. Unfortunately isn‘t an everyday experience. Or, I believe so.
My Reality | Ιn Halftones.
My work is an exploration of paradoxes and contrasts which are torturous and utopian, wild and serene but definitely resilient.
As my reality is in halftones, I capture fragments of life often ignored or forgotten. My art echo’s the unease and mixes it with the uncomfortable reality of continuous transformations of the urban environment in which I live. Faces, pseudo familiar situations, characters belonging to various walks of life… they all inject emotions with such a warm identity to characterize the experience of
ordinary people, those people who would say and tell through the eyes their own existence. Ι represent ordinary people; those actors unaware of being protagonists of present days and to represent them in spite of a reality in half-tone that essentially results a kind of summary, which, in the end, is life! An arrested motion in time. In arresting motion there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality, so I don’t arrest motion in time. I make it. I love my subjects although I don’t know them. I mean, they’re my friends. I’ve never meat any of them or I don’t know them at all, yet I live through them, or I can’t live without them.
They constitute my curriculum vitae.
Memento Mori aka ad Verbum [?] v.9.21 | Mixed Media | 100 x 170 cmS… like Solveig aka What [?] If [?] or a New Grate v.6.24 | Mixed Media | 205 x 100 cm.Memento Mori aka ad Verbum [?] v.11.13 | Mixed Media | 100 x 170 cm.S… like Solveig aka What [?] If [?] or a New Grate v.7.13 | Mixed Media | 100 x 176 cm.