origins
At the intersection between memory and imagination, dream states and waking hours, surreal landscapes are integrated into the body and stilled objects. Compositions often balance a zest for classical beauty with surreal motifs and overlapping images, contemplating the organic relationship of time’s patterns and the cultivation of spontaneity and intuition. There is a sense dreaming the ancient, in a modern land; of superposition and a caress of the nonsensical. Painting to me, is learning to tread in that open posture of self creation and self forgetting, where force gives way to receptivity. Effortless action is birthed through the muse of concentration and surrender; at the threshold of receptivity and action, art begins.
Painting to me, is learning to tread in that open posture of self-creation and self-forgetting, where force gives way to receptivity.
process as evolution
Within all of us lies a natural impetus to create, deconstruct, transform, and complete. My practice has always been a meditation on clearing those external influences which confuse us of our inborn capacities to create, to act spontaneously in flow state, and to get back to what Zen calls the ‘original mind.’ In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates is often characterised as maieutic, a ‘midwife’ of wisdom who helps those he encounters birth or deliver divine wisdom within the soul and bring it forward to the realm of the intellect and reason. While the world of appearances is criticized in Plato, language has this impermeability to it which can only give us the guide notes of the territory, not the real thing: we must have the courage to walk the path of imagination ourselves.
The world of images beckons us closer to it, to listen to reality, and become intimate with the unknown. Creative processes ask us to be constantly open and ready to receive their movements, like dancers moving through the dance, while we are enchanted in receiving the ways they affect and move us.
story
Calia Fernandez is from Toronto, Canada, where her love of reading and lyrical, vivid descriptions of imagery in novels and poetry gave way to a sensitive and wanderlust imagination. Striking an affinity with anything mystical, intuitive, and existential, the Surrealists and Impressionists became a steady source of inspiration. As a yoga practitioner and Taoist enthusiast, she has a fascination with the intentionality of experience, earth and water, archaic virtues, depth psychology, and the anatomy of the body in lived, unlived, and imagined timelines. Having first travelled to Asia as a teenager, the motifs in literati landscape painting, and the philosophy of zen and wabi-sabi are a driving impetus in her work. She studied philosophy, aesthetics, French, and art at The New School in New York City. Rendered a keen student of both Eastern philosophy and the Continental tradition, she seeks to strike connections between the two and fuse their overlapping principles into her visual practice. In the near future, she is eager to study medieval alchemical engravings, the Chinese literati school, and continues to deepen her yoga practice. The studio is based in Uxbridge, Ontario.
