Naranja y Gris Painting

I am a painter and fiber artist living in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. I was born and grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After living and working in Argentina and Colombia, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in California, where I pursued my interests in contemporary quilting and textile design. In 1995 I relocated to North Carolina to the Triangle area with a strong desire to establish my artistic career in fiber design and quilting. During the initial years, I dedicated myself to learn the many techniques of fiber painting and eventually became quite proficient at them. I taught quilting and fabric manipulation classes and I have had my textile artworks exhibited in shows in Raleigh and Cary, NC. My work in fiber painting and fabric dying naturally led me to become very interested in painting as a medium in itself and to the study of color. I have exhibited my paintings at the North Carolina Museum of Art, the City of Raleigh Museum and the Greenville Museum of Art, at galleries in the Triangle Area (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and Cary) in NC, and several of them are in private art collections. A few annotations on my recent work Sewing and painting have been my passions for as long as I can remember. After much experimenting, I found a way to combine my two passions creating a new way of working where I first design, treat and/or paint a fiber element (that could be fabric interface, fiber paper, Tyvek, foundation fabric, etc.) and then incorporate it to the canvas, either by sewing it directly onto the canvas or using cotton batting between the fiber element and the canvas. At that point I quilt these elements using free motion quilting techniques in a totally new way, using exquisite stitching where I intentionally control the process paying close attention to the asymmetry of the stitches and variations on the number of stitches for square inch. I have approached this process in other ways. For example, I have experimented replacing stitching with submerging the fabric in acrylic mediums and then applying this wet fabric on the surface of the canvas (either plain or already worked on) creating transparencies and textures. The thread is almost always the main character in my pieces, either holding things together with machine sewing, or at other times serving as an expressive vehicle, as a conduit to express ideas, feelings or concepts.