Interview
Maria Oliveira
Maria Oliveira is a self-taught Fine Art Photographer born and raised in northern Spain, now based in Southern California. For years she enjoyed the field of landscape and travel photography, but really found her passion when she discovered the potential behind photoshop and fine art compositing. Using herself as the main subject in each photograph she gets to construct her otherworldly reality, often dark, but vibrant, set in a nature world that ultimately connects everything together. It is then when she explores the turmoil of conflicting emotions behind the process of taking control of her own life, only to realize that this is just a journey we are all part of.
What is your background and how did you start your journey in the art world?
“I have always been interested in landscape photography. It is something that I had always enjoyed but I never saw myself as an artist. The possibility of creating any kind of meaningful art never crossed my mind, so it was more like a hobby that I would enjoy from time to time, but not too often. I started creating art in a more serious way much later in life. I am a Mechanical Design Engineer working in the aerospace field, which may seem a completely different path than art. At a moment in my life filled with changes, I quit my job, took a sabbatical, left Spain, my home country, and moved to the United States. Once here I spent a lot of time on what ended up becoming a journey of self discovery. It is then, in the midst of that cathartic moment that somehow I felt called to express that process through self-portraits, and that road led me here.”
What inspires you?
“Anything and everything. I think that art calls for art. A beautiful poem, a painting, the lyrics of a song, a movie. Every time I see something beautiful it moves me to create beauty. Every time I am in nature I am rewarded with beautiful ideas that pop up left and right. A simple conversation can also trigger ideas that I feel drawn to portray in a visual way. Mythology in particular is one of my guilty pleasures and I get a lot of inspiration from it.”
What themes do you pursue? Is there an underlying message in your work?
“I would say that I am trying to use universal ideas that connect us together as humans, but also to nature. I think that we as a civilized culture have gone so far off from nature that we live outside of it, as if we were aliens in a planet where we don’t belong. But there is a world out there that surrounds us and is part of ourselves that can help make sense of our lives, and we can learn from it while simultaneously finding out who we are. Part of this process is becoming aware of the invisible world that we so stubbornly tend to ignore, but it is there, staring at us, without us knowing. Does the world of spirits exist? Are we influenced by it? What are we? Those great mysteries are the main driving force of what inspires me, and with each piece I create I think that I find another piece of the puzzle of my own existence. This world can be both extremely beautiful and ugly at the same time, so I am very inclined to create art that has a positive message, that ultimately it would be “follow your heart.” It’s important to have a good balance between the heart and the mind, but we too often ignore the heart and that leads us to unhappiness.”
How would you describe your work?
“My pieces are a piece of the collective unconscious. They are dark and surreal but extremely colorful, pretty much like a part of my dreams. I like to invert the laws of physics and to include impossible scenarios: double horizons, doorways, symmetries, anti-gravity paired with, and that is something that I constantly look for, a middle of the day light in a nighttime scene. The main objective of all of this is to represent ideas in opposition that melt together with the message of the piece, exactly the same way as our existences are built: for every force, there is an equal and opposite reaction force.”
Which artists influence you most?
“If I have to choose a moment in time where art highly resonates with me it would be the art of the turn of the century: art nouveau, art deco, and the symbolist movement. Specially the symbolists as they feed my curiosity about mythology and spirituality. But if we are talking about contemporary artists, I have to say that if there is an artist that truly haunts me with their art, that is Louise Bourgeois. I had the opportunity to see an exhibition of her “Structures of Existence: The Cells” and a very wide collection of her installations at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao which left me completely in awe. I was shocked about how brilliant this woman was and how immersive the experience was, and all that communicated in a non verbal way. I could feel how I was transported to a different world, not mine, but hers. She carries you to her unconscious mind and you remain there, felling her pain and sorrow. I highly admire how this woman used her art clearly as an expression of her feelings and traumas in such a haunting and almost kind of magical way. Of course my list of favorite artists is endless but I have to point out the surrealist movement is also something I look up to: Dali, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Leonor Fini and I could go on!”
“I like to invert the laws of physics and to include impossible scenarios: double horizons, doorways, symmetries, anti-gravity paired with, and that is something that I constantly look for, a middle of the day light in a nighttime scene.”
What is your creative process like?
“As David Lynch says “ I believe that if you sit quietly, like you're fishing, you will catch ideas. The real, you know, beautiful, big ones swim deep down there so you have to be very quiet, and you know, wait for them to come along. If you catch an idea, you know, any idea, it wasn't there and then it's there!” I completely agree with him. As soon as I get an idea I write it down and then I usually think about it for a while, it doesn’t matter how long it takes, but I often try to develop it without forcing it. And with time and meditation it often starts taking shape, so I can decide what my initial draft is going to look like. All my pictures are composite photographs and I never shoot on location. So I tend to create my backdrop first and then shoot a self-portrait in the privacy of my home. I then bring the portrait into the backdrop in photoshop and edit it so it looks seamless. During this process of editing more often than not each piece tends to get a life of their own and usually the final result doesn’t look anything like the original image I had in mind.”
What is an artist’s role in society and how do you see that evolving?
“I think that art in general is not a luxury but a need. I could not imagine a world without music, for example. Art is meant to connect us together, by any means necessary, sometimes through beauty and sometimes through darkness. I honestly think that everybody is capable of producing art, they just have to find out what their medium is. Bakery is an art. Engineering can be an art. Anything that involves creating something out of the blue is one of the most beautiful and fulfilling things a human can do, so we should encourage each other to do so. We are taking something that is not tangible, just an idea, and making it possible, physical, for everybody to enjoy, because art does not belong to anybody, we are just “mediums” that bring those ideas to life.”
Have you had any noteworthy exhibitions you'd like to share?
“I have shown my work in several group exhibitions throughout the United States in the past few years since I started putting my art out there, and I have had the opportunity to show my work also internationally in Barcelona (Spain) and Rome (Italy). It is always a joy to do so and to feel that a piece of art that you created ultimately for yourself is appreciated by outsiders that can find some significance to it is very fulfilling and honestly, unexplainable! If I have to point out an exhibition that really made me proud was one group show called “Portal” at BG Gallery in Santa Monica (CA) where my piece was sharing walls with two engravings from Goya. I never thought that I would see the day my art would be hanging next to one of the most significant and famous painters in Spain in the 18th-19th centuries. Truly an honor to me and something I will always remember.”
Website: www.maria-oliveira.com
Instagram: @mariaoliveiradiz
