43 degrees in the shade Painting

Maria Fernandez was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and is based in Melbourne Australia since 1986, and also in Barcelona Spain since 2015. Maria's formal art training includes courses and workshops over the past 16 years with some well established Australian contemporary artists, such as Richard Granville-Smith, David Moore, Adriane Strampp and Michael Mark, and more recently with American artist Rebecca Crowell who specializes in Cold Wax medium. Maria works predominantly with the painting medium, and also sometimes with photography and assemblages using found objects and recycling materials. She is inspired by the diversity of textures and colours drawn from nature, and by objects and materials that have being used, have aged, and have then been discarded. She is interested in the history embedded in these objects, in their texture of decay. Maria mainly paints abstract forms to reflect the environment that surrounds her, the elements that she remembers or that for some reason have caught her attention in the past. Maria's technique is mainly based on building textures as well as layers of colour of different depth. She experiments with media and techniques to express herself with freedom and with no boundaries. She is inspired by American Abstract Expressionists, mainly Rothko and Pollock, as well as many of the Catalan maestros of modern times Tapies, Miro and Picasso.