Still Life, Still Alive 1 Painting

Maria Kalnars is a figurative abstract artist and musician based in Sheffield, UK. She grew up in a small town in mid Wales, a child of immigrant parents. She moves between abstract and representational art. She is guided by feminist principles and these ideas frequently stem from current global events, things she’s seen and experienced, addressed both conceptually and through live drawing. Much of her work strongly links the aural and the visual e.g. rhythmic movements with complex cross-rhythms, harmonic relationships, textural variety, differing tempos and timbres. Forms emerge from the colours. Kalnars creates artworks in small collections, delivering a strong visual conversation and path of development like a set of pieces within a musical suite. The media she uses is oil, acrylic, collage, pastel, pen, and sculptural elements often using found objects, and often mixing and combining a variety of these. She applies paint using brushes and a variety of re-purposed tools to connect surface texture, shape, light, shadow and colour, and their relationship to one another – e.g. the body in manuscript paper. Kalnars’ influences are numerous, too many artists to mention, but amongst whom are: Paula Rego, with her figurative abstract art, strong and politically charged and meaningful, energy and issue-led, use of fairy tales and horror stories, and overall theatricality; Lee Krasner and her abstract expressionist works, use of collage and reusing sections of her cut-up work: Picasso, for his gestural improvisation, realism, and his development of forms; Pignon, his political beliefs as a radical socialist expressed in his paintings and pottery, and his use of colour and form. Kalnars’ organic and instinctive work references connections and resonances between natural phenomena and our own personal structures and environments. She often interprets her experience in terms of musical feelings and sounds which she conveys in her layered works. Her music also reflects this in composing graphic scores, and performing them in ifitisn’t, and kalnars/robinson.