The b-uncut blog

b-loud: Meet painter Marie Kazalia

// November 3rd, 2009 // b-loud // Kara

The artist under the spotlight this week, is US-based painter Marie Kazalia.

Marie was recently honored to have a small artwork in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art part of the Book About Death, an exhibition at the Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery in New York City. Pretty impressive if you ask us!

A poet of some renown in the San Francisco bay area in the nineties, her art combines the subtle flavours of her travels and experiences, which is evidenced in terms of gesture, form, colour combinations and layers. Marie has two sides to her personality, a yin and a yang: she’s both introspective (her current phase), searching, reading, seeing, studying, trying to learn how to do new things…and then she has her wild side that she left (mostly) in San Francisco. Oh and of course there was that lost year in India. Really she only meant to do a short trip to Tokyo and somehow she ended up wandering off and well perhaps we can delve into that another time.

Marie consistently creates a complex ground on canvas or panel, by using overloaded acrylic image transfers from found images or collage, over which she layers transparent and semi-opaque acrylic. She then finishes her compositions by using oil and alkyd paint. At the end of the process of layering acrylics and images the canvas is left with what she calls a visual texture.

Marie’s Splash series of paintings began when the rainwater on a tree in her garden soaked a bark and dripped into a vessel she had placed there accidentally.

Marie explains: “After the rain stopped, I discovered the vessel contained the light ‘tea stain’ and understood from my study of natural dyes how to make use of it. I collected the tannin water and returned to my studio to pour the liquid onto a paper support surface, over and over; as the water of each poured layer evaporated I collected and poured more, building layers. Then I began to paint the tannin “tea-stained” areas with watercolor paint, acrylic paint glazes, finally adding details with markers. That was how I came to create the first of the Splash series of paintings. My father was quite ill and then passed away shortly after I painted this first Splash.’

When I did return to the Splash painting two years later, it was as a quite different me; I was unable to recreate my approach. I worked from real tea stain make from store-bought tea bags, and as my forms for my Splash paintings expanded and developed I began to use other art materials, such and acrylic mediums and alkyds, and pour my mixes directly onto stretched canvases. I feel many of my color choices are influenced by advertisements –American, Japanese, Chinese–influences from my travel and expat years in Asia.”

We’re seriously loving these different influences conveyed through Marie’s pieces, and well her work is continuing to move in interesting directions! You can check out Marie’s splash series and some of her more recent paintings in the virtual gallery, or if you can’t quite afford her beautiful paintings, why not purchase a little something from the store instead?

What’s your fav Marie Kazalia piece? Let us know in the comments!