"Antimony as Nubia" Painting

Tina Blondell was born in 1953 in Salzburg, Austria, to an American father and Austrian mother who encouraged her early interest in art. Tina has lived in Austria, France, Italy, and the U.S. She currently resides in Minneapolis (USA). The paintings below represent a sampling of her works in both watercolors and oils.

The portrait (left) is an oil on canvas completed 2000 (97 x 66 cm). The painting is in the style of the carved bone or ceramic figurines from paleolithic Europe known as "stiff nudes". More recent works can be found below.

The current body of work retells the stories of women, mythical and biblical, real and imagined. These archetypal images enquire into the essence of human experience revealed in feminine form.

The watercolor paintings had their origin in the personal experience of realizing the ways that life transforms us. The artists own realization of how she had been marked by events and emotions became clear in her identification with the fragile and fearless figures that emerged from her imagination. Through the creative process, pain had been transformed into beauty.

What began as an inward, healing process moved outward to reclaim the history of images of the feminine, ranging from the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf to present-day women who embody the energy of their female antecedents. They all have chosen a path of exposure of both their outward identities and their inner selves. For these women, the depth of their experiences has reached the surface, symbolically in the form of the motifs that cover their skin. The tattoo lattice sometimes extends to the children the women hold, as an imprinting of the memory of ancestral female power.

The process of creating these images begins with a concept, first visualized, then realized through finding the right model, props, and lightingwith photographs used as an aid. These paintings depict real women, not idealized images, so that each models real beauty is reflected back through the work. The completing of a painting is a labor-intensive process that can take many weeks. These works embody a paradox: while rendering strong imagery, the delicacy of watercolor conveys the psychic openness of the whole process. Recent paintings in oil strive to realistically capture the human form, seeing in the lives of contemporary women an abiding spirit.

When the work, very personal in its development, is finished, it is ready to be shared.