"Two trees" Painting

Manuela Ferreira started drawing and painting at a young age when she attended a Fine Arts preparatory school. As she grew, her work became a more personal quest through drawing and etching, whilst continuing to paint with gouache and water colours.

When she moved to live in the South of France, colour became the principal focus of her work. For several years she painted on silk, and the delicacy and almost infinite range of the tones obtained with this technique made her even more aware of the vital universe of colour. This universe then became central to her work.

Later, her painting became more classical, using tempera on paint supports such as paper and medium density fibreboard (MDF).

Manuela endeavours to share exactly what the act of painting means to her personally. She chooses landscape as a metaphor of the meditation that underpins her artistic activity; in other words, for her, painting is a form of meditation and landscape its support.

Each painting is a mental landscape composed of stereotypes: the sea, mountains, lakes, rocks, trees. Shapes are simple, almost naive. Everything is imagined, nothing in nature looks like this, it is painting «on a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order». (Maurice Denis).

Colour dominates her work; the components that build up the landscapes have neither shadows nor light; they exist alone in the intensity of the coloured material and the chromatic palette.

The tempera (gouache) she uses consists exclusively of water, pigments and egg yolk which accentuates the freshness of her colour whilst at the same time enables a wide range of pictural effects, from pure water colour to «a fresco» painting, including a matte finish of the gouache.

The small and medium formats hold the eye rather than submerging it, since here the meditation in question aims not to impose anything on spectators but to accompany them with calm and intensity.