Curaty's featured artist of the week is Anca S. She often works between digital and traditional painting mediums, to create artworks that are vibrant and yet deeply entrenched in emotions. Check out this incredible blog she put together to share her story and journey as an artist.
What's your story?
I had the extraordinary opportunity of being raised by my grandparents in an old and beautiful village in Romania, infused by the Neolithic era.
I had often found small pieces of ancient painted pottery in unexpected places and today when I look back I interpret those joyful discoveries, like in Hansel and Gretel story, as the signs that pointed my direction "home".
In my early childhood like any child, I invented my own games and I mostly played painting with mud on broken pieces of glass, building objects from cardboard, or moulding mugs and vases.
I studied art from the age of twelve and graduated from the Art University in Bucharest with a degree in painting, even if I studied painting only for two years.
I militated through happenings, performances and installations against traditionalism, limited perceptions and definitions regarding any artistic processes.
I graduated presenting a conceptual artwork consisting in a book – disclosing the process of identification of how the beliefs are adopted and expressed. The book was recorded in a sound studio and the audio tape was used in the performance “Who am I?”
The importance of direct communication and connection with the viewer inspired me to act as a performer for several years while collaborating on art projects with film and music companies as a digital artist.
I trained in London as a CG animation, visual effects artist as well as Digital Intermediate Colourist.
Painting came back into my life with the understanding that we are all in pursuit of happiness and joy, of emotions that transcend any egotistic limitations.
I believe in the energy of colours, in the power of healing since each colour vibration opens channels of communication with the divinity and wholeness within.
What motivates you, or why do you do what you do?
All I care for are the emotions that I express through my passions and ultimately throughout my actions. Our thoughts and emotions are vibrations and just like the colours they are the universal language which everyone instinctively responds to.
I have felt my entire life that I am more than this body, I’ve watched its limitations while I’ve equally observed the freedom, the limitless of my imagination, of my inner emotions not always related with physical facts.
I felt my skin more like the border of a country, real on paper but no more than an idea in truth.
Gradually through my life I accepted something that I had always known and that is our physical bodies reside in our consciousness.
In my imagination I see our bodies more like projected images on the screen we call our world. A white canvas we are all painting it together. I feel we are all energy in motion creating from ideas the reality we all perceive.
When such an idea is accepted we become aware that nothing outside us decides or dictates our experiences, that we are by extension the creators.
We are the real walking gods.
This idea is depicted in my artworks...in my vision this is the background for the human body, ungrounded, untied or belonging to any physical reality or limitation.
When I create I am like in a dream state and I ideate not just objects to be looked at, but an extension of my inner state, an out of the body experience that will give to the viewer glimpses from another dimension… Paintings are solidified feelings on canvas and when the observer is looking at them the feeling is again motion, moving out from the painting into the beholder’s perception. I believe in this perfect continuum.
I paint human bodies in partially abstract composition and all I see are dreamers with a shared dream…a dream of love, the only dream that inspires and keeps alive, me the only emotion I wish to extend through my finite form in our co-created experience we call physical life on Earth.
What do you want your life to look like in 5 years, and what are you doing right now to get there?
The world is on “pause” from outer activity and is the most silent it has been in years. We live in a physical community but we live first of all in a community of thoughts and feelings.
In silence we create…when all the inner feelings awaken, when all the parts that form us reunite in one…when time ceases to be a measure.
In silence we can feel, hear and see without using the physical senses.
Consciousness creates form. Our personalities are not primarily physical.
There are portions in us far superior to the ordinary self but so focused on daily concerns that we forget who we are.
To me nothing threatens the body more than the despair, sadness or depression. Our imagination, thoughts and feelings followed by actions mould the reality we perceive. In silence we can dream and envision the world we want to see it manifested.
The world is on “pause” and I feel there is an enormous opportunity right now in this silence for all humanity to redefine itself, to change paradigms that work no more… In this “pause” the world is reimagined.
In five years I would love to live in a much more integrated reimagined world where the illusion of separation would have faded.
Videos from Anca's Masterclass & Studio Visit:
