Interview for Raluca Harabagiu Blogpost
https://ralucaharabagiu.com/
The Conversations of Ana Gurduza on Poetry of Being and Art
Jul 10, 2024
My interview with Ana is here to be read and loved. I therefore encourage you to draw inspiration from the incredible world that Ana has created because it almost seems magical and surreal in its depth and beauty. Ana is truly remarkable, and this article is among the most outstanding, intricate, and profound I have ever written. I am quite humbled.
Who was Ana Gurduza as a child, and when did her passion, drive, and artistic talent emerge?
As a child, I dreamed of having a semiobscure wooden attic with skylights facing green trees, a place filled with unusual objects, a museum-like collection between memory and dreaming, where I could paint. This path has now become my studio, a dreamlike space for creation.
My grandfather was a wood craftsman, an art teacher, and an observer of the world. His children, including my father, drew, but for none of them, drawing became a life's pursuit. I aspire to believe that my generation's inherited talent blossoms through me, shaping me into a creator of images and narratives. My family supported me on this path, as well as my deviations from it.
As a child, I studied painting and literature in the privacy of my home in the Republic of Moldova, where I developed my hand, eye, and sensitivity. I was a child who loved to read and draw; this was my intimate refuge. I studied painting at the Valeriu Poliakov School of Arts in Chișinău, then almost completely stopped painting for ten years—a severe break that I couldn't understand at the time. The fear of imitation was there.
The call to manual labour and images never ceased to torment me, and I had to follow it, like a lost paradise I longed for without even knowing it. When I founded my own studio, I felt peace, courage, faith, satisfaction, and restlessness to do and to be. I know I found my place and purpose, which I can carry for a lifetime.
I loved something I read on your site, www.arsana.art. The poetry of being. The aim is to learn, practice, and preach the immortal value of the invisible. Is this the core of your work?
This sentence encompasses a wide range of my beliefs about the role and power of art, as well as my mission. I am an ongoing student, both in the face of the miracle of life and in relation to art. I wish, in the not-too-distant future, to be able to pass over what I have learned and absorbed throughout my life, remaining a student of life and a practitioner of art.
I dream of a school about beauty, colour, form, and abstraction. It has the driving force to overcome reality and build an imaginary reality, which becomes the construction of our beliefs. Through the prism of these beliefs, we manifest ourselves in the world. Imagine how the knowledge that there is a life beyond life has changed the way mankind lives for thousands of years. It is a power that man has and that other beings do not.
Otherwise, art tells us an invisible truth; it is a chronicle of the evolution of the human soul. If a history book could explain the causes of war, the legacy of munitions, and the treaties of war and peace, it would not be able to delve into the soul motives that led a nation to follow a leader who committed murder.
Only art can, through surgical operations of the spirit, speak of the aspiration to good or bad beauty. If you want to know the truth about 19th-century England, ask Dickens. If you're interested in learning about the medieval era, consult Giotto, and if you're interested in learning about the Greeks, turn to Sophocles. This heritage is not an object; it has a privileged status as the artefact of the generations that will follow it, about the strength of faith in an invisible imaginary.
I would say that art, in addition to philosophy and religion, is the gate opener to the transcendent. Through it, we know the invisible. It starts with the appearance of the word; art is the word. Through it, we traverse the unseen gods of past and future, the rivers of youth without old age and life without death.
Through art, we overcome our own condition, the biological one, and learn the imaginary. We recreate worlds and futures in which we strongly believe; this belief guides our present. This is the power of art. It transposes into reality with a striking force—the imaginary, ideas, dreams, concepts, and prophecies.
An artwork is not placed in time; it breaks boundaries and speaks of something we contain within us. This transcendence of immediate reality and the construction of a second reality is the manifestation of the invisible and of art.
I couldn't help but notice how sublime blue hues enhance your artistic world. Why this particular colour?
My heart loves blue.
This colour has a special story. Due to its rarity in nature, blue has a shorter history than the other colours. Blue belonged to something volatile and unattainable, like the sky and the sea, both unfathomable.
The Egyptians used the dust from the Lapis lazuli (heaven stone), a stone that only arrived in Europe (Italy) during the Middle Ages. Being the most expensive and fine pigment, brought precisely from the region of Afghanistan (this is where the name ultramarine comes from, i.e., the pigment brought from overseas), it was used for absolutely special elements, such as the mantle of the Virgin, Giotto's blue sky in the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, or precious details that marked a special character.
In the early Renaissance, the Venetian church established a monopoly on blue, with strictures on where and how it could be used; it had become a symbol colour. It is the same blue that, given its preciousness, was used in the fresco seco technique, that is, as a later layer added over the raw fresco, which caused the deterioration of the blue (and gold) pigment on mediaeval frescoes.
Today, we cannot imagine a world without blue, in gradients and shades. I bring the same eulogy to the symbol—colour, the sky—walking upwards through the especially deep blue of cobalt oxide.
And why the invitation, Let's sail together?
It is an invitation to get in the boat with me. It’s an invitation to depart from the solid, secure ground and venture into the unknown, where you will find yourself transformed into a new individual. A traveller never returns the same; he is another person after a journey. I need to express myself as a traveller in his dream of weaving beauty and play, but I don't do it out of a need to express my emotions, even if what I do contains them. However, my work is a gift to someone who can recognise and appreciate beauty.
My journey is also an invitation to discover new horizons, with the sails wide open. A language with its own vocabulary where letters are colours, shapes, proportions, framing, lines, dynamics, and depth.
I am learning this alphabet so that I can speak the language of feelings and convey them, not just pour them out into the world. Through this inward journey, I hope to purify its forms and become more expressive, allowing my feelings to transcend from the individual to the universal human experience and resonate with others.
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https://ralucaharabagiu.com/ars-ana-atelier-uniques-pieces/