In my youth I earned a graduate degree in Applied Art, however, with children to raise and a job to hold, I found no time for artistic pursuits. I hoped that later in life I would be able to find the time to express myself as an artist. That time came in 2006 when I moved from Romania to the United States, where my kids lived. Here I started a new phase of my life – a late painting journey. As a beginner I was overwhelmed and scared about the whole process. I spent a lot of time in the library reading books about art, materials and process. Soon I acquired a new visual vocabulary and I tried to implement what I had learned into my work. I started with watercolor and discovered by chance the pleasure of painting on Yupo – a type of synthetic paper. Two years later I moved to acrylics. A visit to Puget Sound’s Jones Island enabled me to discover unusual beautiful rocks that triggered a series of paintings. Later I found a good source of inspiration in stumps and bark, observed while hiking in the forests. Painting them, I proved to myself that nature is the best teacher. Later, a fascination with “abstract” energy got a hold of me.
From the very beginning I was attracted to abstract art. I dreamed about painting in an painterly style, but it came much easier to have a stylized, decorative, design style, somehow colder and rigid, determined from within by my architecture/decorative studies. While working I learned that I am mostly attracted to expressing myself spontaneously, to develop my ideas directly on canvas, without prior sketches. The more bold and uninhibited I start, the more gates I unlock for imagination to flourish and bring out details. The result, most of the time, is abstracted with an organic touch. I am still fascinated by the way the creative process works; the way it extracts information from my intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual background, and expresses itself through intuition – like coming from nowhere.
Now, eight years later I am still chasing the state where my native openness and lyrical predisposition will freely translate into a spontaneous expression of flowing masses of colors and energetic, restless brush strokes. I want my art to be abstract, ambiguous, spontaneous, and full of energy and flooded with colors. I am working on it, wanting to please my lonely spirit on this journey without a destination. http://www.lucia.neagu.com