Artist Talk at the Bloomington Art Center, Bloomington, MN, October 2010. WARM Mentor Marcia Soderman-Olson and myself.

“Exhibit: WARM – THE ART OF MENTORING”

Ines Greenberg Gallery at the Bloomington Center for the Arts, Sep-Oct. 2010

Artist Talk: Silvana LaCreta Ravena

I am a Brazilian-born artist who moved to the Twin Cities in 2006. I was educated as a psychologist and also hold degrees in art therapy , art history and a master in fine arts.

Memory has been the constant subject of my paintings. I became particularly interested in this subject during my practice as a clinical psychologist, an experience that helped me to infuse my art works with principles based on different lines of thoughts in psychology. For instance, some Freudian concepts, ideas from the Psychology of Gestalt about visual perception and some Jungian concepts are particularly important to my work. For me, image is a psychological experience of pleasure, culturally determined and socially legitimated.

Since memory is a complex concept, I approach this idea from different perspectives according to the series I’m working on. For instance, in my series “The Brasilianas” I explore my personal memories of Brazil whereas in another series called “The Pompeii Series” I reflect on historical memory, based on the tragic events involving the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Still in another series called “The Boxed Memories”, I explore the connections between cognitive and involuntary memory, based on the influence of the aerial views in the process of abstracting images. If you ever are interested in seeing those images, please, go to www.silvanaravena.com

I’ve been around for a while, and over those years I’ve worked with different types of media such as acrylic, watercolor, mixed media, oil, encaustic and batik. I love working with wax and have explored encaustic in a variety of ways, surfaces and possibilities. I am currently working with wax and oil, and am particularly interested in the qualities of these two media that make the passage of time more visible. From my perspective, the passage of time is intimately associated with the concept of memory and makes clear the reason why memory is so important to our psyche and culture, memory is the way we try to overcome the impermanence of life.

I brought to this WARM show a recent work called “New México”, an oil on canvas, in which I tried to convey the difficult harmonies resulting from NM’s complex history, the almost impossible dialectical balance between the ancient Indian wisdom, the heritage of the old pueblos and highly technological research. Here I was moved by the contrasting landscapes reverberating contrasting realites, glazed by a veil of mystery.

This work is particularly significant for this exhibit, because one of the most important outcomes of my mentorship with Marcia Soderman-Olson was resuming my work with oil medium. The series of paintings in which I use oil exclusively is based on the memories of my recent travels around the US. In this series, as in “New México”, I keep the same approach to the image, using many layers and heavy textures, but here I give much more attention to colors than I used to give in my encaustic work. I keep the same methodology for creating my images, departing from aerial view studies to figure out where I want to go.

Finally, I’d like to point out that both encaustic and oil help me to intensify the physicality of my paintings. This is a very important element in my work. As a psychologist, I consider the expression of texture as a tool to reach profound levels of the psyche. As an artist, I am deeply interested in the continuous interplay between matter and sensation, exploring the boundaries of two and three dimensions. The overall intention of my work is to give the viewer an opportunity to experience the presence of the painting as a critical response to the ongoing dematerialization of the reality of our contemporary world.

Silvana LaCreta Ravena

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