Self-portrait Painting

Alicia Martí­n was born in 1974 on the island of La Palma, Canary Islands. She began experimenting with painting techniques at a very young age, in fact she performed her first exhibition at the early age of 15. From this moment on the challenge of understanding and interpreting reality began for her and it seemed to never ceased. She even sold her first works as a adolescent where we can see that as an artist she made her first attempts experimenting with painting using a still rough and not even polished technique. She sold her first works when she was fifteen years old. Later on, in 1997 she joined the Faculty of Fine Arts at La Laguna University in Tenerife, Canary Islands. There she began her academic career until 2001 when she graduated. Ever since her first exhibition, she has been painting and exhibiting in several art galleries in La Palma, Tenerife and Barcelona. Now she lives in Tenerife, where she is working on her new projects. Alicia Martin's paintings remind us of a symbolic world that speaks of human existence, her self-portraits go back to those images of Venus found in the Paleolithic Era. Those female forms announce forms full of life and fertility. We can find in her works objects such as ladders, houses, flowers, shells and so on that tell us about the human condition, a life chain where everything has a beginning and an end, bodies that dance alone, or surrounded by objects, flowers, houses... that dance in unison. For her, painting is an unavoidable way of living, existing, and acquiring our own personal recognition, a way of setting our own individual identity among that of the crowd. For her the artist should use earthly raw materials to express our idea of beauty so as to tell different stories of reality and thus convey a specific vision of the world. For Alicia Martin painting also is a game where the artist`s hand strokes and lines join and where the artist experiments with colour and light... a game that also tells us a story about our existence where elements that speak of an ephemeral world come together. According to Alicia our sense of loneliness is wrapped up in a veil of eroticism. For her, sex and love are part of life, we love every time we live and painting involves a mockery of death. Death is part of life, a piece of our living existence and no matter how hard society attempts to fade it out it still pervades and remains dancing in perfect unison with life.