Tiana Marie:
Articles

Photograph by Lancaster Guardian

THE CREATIVE PALETTE
Grazyna Monvid


 

The announcement of a forthcoming exhibition of Tiana Marie’s work, for those who are familiar with and connect with it, is really all the information that needs to be given.

Each will already have their own vital relationship with and through her art which this exhibition will allow them to develop further.

For those who do not yet know her work one can only say, "Go, go, go!!!" An exciting and dynamic experience awaits you.

When Tiana Marie began her professional career in 1981 at the age of twenty-one in her native Cumbria, it was primarily as a painter of Lakeland landscapes. She was the youngest person to be elected to the Lake Artists' Society in 1983, and the influences of Turner and Palmer were noted in her work. But if this is where she began her journey, she has travelled a long way since, to the point where the description is now almost misleading and antithetical to her work. For while the title implies attachment to the particular and local, albeit in varying states and moods, one of the most stunning qualities of her work now is its universality and totality. She has a sometimes literally breath-taking power to capture, realise and re-create the sharpest conflicts, the deepest congruences, separations and contradictions existing in creation.

By creation I do not mean simply 'the natural world' as something outside and separate from us. Through her imagery, Tiana Marie constantly confronts our awareness of our own human powers not just as part of that creation, but also as channels embodying, harnessing or exploiting the energies involved. For example it is impossible to look at an extant piece like The Eternal Summer of Memory, where the sun explodes its life-giving force over the skies and fields, without also being reminded of other less benign man-made explosions over fields of battle. Likewise it is impossible to look at one of the new pieces on which she is presently working in which trees are scarlet irradiations of energy, without thinking simultaneously of not just the human nervous and blood systems and the energy patterns of other plants, but also, at the same time, of those horrifying seconds captured on film from Hiroshima where not only trees, but human beings and the cities they had built were all caught in a similar state of irradiation directed by Man's destructive intervention through the atomic bomb.

As an artist, Tiana Marie has the extraordinary ability to be at once here, there and everywhere. Her 'point of view' - and therefore ours - is constantly moving, changing focus from the inner to the outer eye, involving all the senses, conscious and unconscious which we traditionally accept, and more. In her own words, she celebrates "the SPIRIT of things" beyond the form and "seeks to touch the spirit and awaken the creative force" in all who view her work. This is what I mean by "a dynamic experience awaits you".

There is a wonder-full passion in her work, articulated with total, precise clarity. 'Electrifying' is perhaps the most apposite description of moments when she captures energy in that now perhaps clichéd phrase 'the unity of opposites', when magnetic attractions and repulsions are caught in a creative fulcrum which fairly crackles with dramatic tension and intensity.

Brilliant and bold, colours and textures fairly dance together. To her original water-colours, oil pastels, acrylics and alkyd dyes have accrued - and for this forthcoming exhibition whatever other materials are appropriate - as Tiana returns to an earlier love of collage in her creating process. Sometimes in complement, sometimes in contrast, each has its own singular value, perfectly orchestrated.

Into this dance we are invited and it is a dance with many moods - trenchant, lowering, lyrical or melancholic by turns. The paintings sing, rumble or sigh. They whirl, shift, drift or settle in hazy humming, eerily audible silence or clear, sublime tranquillity.

GRAZYNA MONVID, actress, author and playwright

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