In front of the sea (Frente al mar), Acrylic / wood panel.
Working on a panel allows the artist to use a lot of material.
Dimension art cm: (H) 80 x (W) 50.5 x (D) 5 cm. / Inches: (H) 31.5 x (W) 19.88 x (D) 1,7 "
The pictures of Raquel Fariñas are presented before our eyes with an almost naive simplicity. We find in them elements of nature reduced to their most synthetic features, primitive games of perspective, and geometric frames as agglutination of those elements dispersed by the painting in apparent chaos.
Her work is full of universal symbols belonging to the imaginary of traditional culture of all time; with them, and her masterful use of color and composition, she manages to unleash her deepest vital concerns.
Raquel Fariñas, Spanish artist, art designer, teacher and art therapist, is also a renowned illustrator of children´s literature.
As an art therapist, Raquel Fariñas uses her artistic creations as personal therapy, which helps her reflect on life and on her own existence, reducing highly complex thoughts to the most essential pictorial expression. The sun and the moon; the earth, the wind and the sea; plants and flowers; the fish, and the birds; the characters that fly chasing their dreams, sometimes so difficult to reach; and the world upside down are part of her pictorial universe.
Her paintings, of great chromatic beauty, are complex but harmonious compositions that convey goodness and serenity. The calm that is reached after effective art therapy.
The artist says:
“My paintings are the medium that I dispose off to reflect on the reality beyond rational knowledge, to portray the beauty I always seek. When I paint, every element of the reality I am depicting is revealed as a carrier of truth and beauty, which confers them a different sense than its mere appearance or utility.
At this conceptual plane, everything is interrelated and I notice another existence that I’m unable to explain with words. Then, everyday life makes sense because I experience, like Rodin, that ‘it exists, above all, what the greatest part of people does not know to see: the unknown depths, the foundations of life’. So, what I can not express in concept, I do it with images, and it is here where the world of symbols appears; the concepts of unveiling and hiding are connected in a symbol. Symbols, myths, dreams reveal what escapes from immediate experience, to consciousness.
This is how I create shapes in my artwork. In a tree I find the Natural Law of Development and Growth. In the circular, round, the Cyclical Law of the Sun and the Moon, and their celestial movements; the cycles of food, and water… Also the fabrics are important: everything is weaved, linked.
There is no opposition between up and down, The one is reflection of the other.
To see and to contemplate are not the same. When I paint I attempt to contemplate, and I give this contemplation to other people, who will transform my signs into symbols and my symbols into signs. I never ask to follow my interpretations. You, the viewer, are the creator of a new meaning”.
RAQUEL FARIÑAS
***The Spanish Philatelic Postal and Telegraphic Service issued a beautiful series of eight self-adhesive stamp depicting reproductions of eight works by Raquel Fariñas which have Spanish Traditional Nursery Rhymes as a common theme, as well as a stamp from one of her paintings to commemorate Christmas 2003.