origins
My paintings explore places where memory flows into imagination and imagination into memory, and boundaries where dream states and natural landscapes are integrated with 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.
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 was raised in a small town outside of Toronto, Ontario, where her love of reading and lyrical, vivid descriptions of imagery in novels and poetry gave way to a highly sensitive and wanderlust imagination in childhood. Books teased her way to music and visual art, striking an affinity with any mode of artistic expression in which the inner world could forge its way to the outer. Her fascination with the intentionality of experience, from how music and cultural aesthetic influences our sensory qualities, to lived, unlived, and imagined time, rendered her a keen student of both Eastern philosophy and the Continental tradition, seeking to strike connections between the two and fuse their conclusions together.
From a young age her riches were always founded upon the backbone of diverse cultural family roots, the education and magic of travel, and insightful teachers and friends to guide the path. She first picked up watercolour paints at nine, taking lessons from a local artist in Whitby, then flocked to surrealism in acrylic painting, collage, and photography throughout her teenage years at an independent all-girls’ school, and settled on a formal painting education from the Milan Art Institute. She studied philosophy at The New School in New York City, and is currently working on her MA with an emphasis on aesthetics, philosophy of perception, and French. 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.
