"Nuit d'étoiles (Burbujas nocturnas)" Print

Mayra Bibiana Briceño is a Colombian painter based in Bogotá, whose creative life has taken the long, necessary route back to itself. As a girl and teenager in Cali, she entered every painting competition she could find. The diplomas are gone now, lost somewhere between then and now, but the impulse never left. When it came time to choose a future, she chose graphic design, the practical path, the one that could support a life. And it did. For years, she worked with precision and purpose while raising four children and leaving little room for anything else. During that time, she discovered suminagashi, the ancient Japanese technique of floating ink on water, and found in its controlled accident a practice she could sustain alongside everything else. Those fluid, unpredictable pieces became the beginning of something. Her Point of Departure series on Saatchi Art documents that threshold: works born from suminagashi and then intervened with dots of color, placed one by one, carefully, because the brush still felt like too much. Color first. Trust later. The brush came. So did the landscapes, the forests, the remembered city lights, the four trees she painted for Guatavita, one for each of her children. Working with acrylics on paper, she now spends her days building new worlds: luminous, layered, personal. She has made nearly a hundred works. Some stronger than others, she'll tell you honestly, but all of them are part of a practice she intends to follow as far as it will go. Canvas waits ahead, when these first works make it possible. Briceño's painting is what happens when someone trained to serve other people's visions finally turns the color toward her own.