Featured Artist Ingrid Blixt

Artist Ingrid Blixt focuses on a wide-ranging subject matter in stark black and white – love, death, hope. See more of her artwork by visiting her website.

 

 

I read art statements often; most of them are coherent, pertinent and beautiful. Every time I have to write about my work, I have a hard time, I do it – it just doesn’t come easy. It either turns out too poetic or too abrupt.

 

 

If I think about it though, my work does have some of those attributes. My drawings, drawing being my primary medium, have a high value and textural contrast. They communicate a story line that has both spiritual and symbolic connotations, aiming towards values close to the heart of humanity.

 

 

The cultural and highly spiritual environment I was born and raised in still inspires and influences my work. The strong Orthodox background of my upbringing led to the discovery and embrace of Byzantine art which initially focused my attention on art, compassion and spirituality.

 

 

In Romania I studied fine arts and graphic arts, graduating with a BFA in fine arts and MFA in graphic arts from the University of Art and Design of Cluj Napoca. After moving to United States, I continued my career as a visual artist, working within both fine arts and graphic design fields. Merging the two fields, lately I’ve been working with digital illustration, which also extended into teaching electronic imaging at university level.

 

 

For the past couple of years I worked on a series of artworks entitled “Stains” – an emotional insight into the events of WWII, seen as a never healing wound, a hit to the core of humanity which still propagates ripples.

 

 

My current project, “The Beatitudes” a series of 8 mixed media artworks: photography, drawing, encaustic painting and silver leaf on wood surface. The title of the series, “The Beatitudes” refers directly to a set of teachings by Jesus that appear in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, expressed as eight blessings in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew.

 

 

The artworks consist of multiple wood panels, the images are pieced together, not all the parts are revealed, giving it the feel of a reconstructed image, rediscovered. The organization of the multiple panels gives the artworks a wonderful dynamism in spite of the very static, almost frozen image.

 

 

Regarding the technique, encaustic painting is predominant throughout the artwork. I also use metal leaf for some of the pieces, an influence from Byzantine Art.

 

 

Always fascinated by the possibility and phenomenon of transcendence, as much as I can, I am exploring ways of expressing the beautiful break in the ordinary, the great moment when apparently ordinary things become truly real, transporting you to a new level of understanding and empathy.

Ingrid Blixt invites you to follow her on Facebook and subscribe to her blog.