Ewa Tarsia

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Ewa Tarsia studied art at the Gdynia School of Fine Arts, Poland (1974-1979), moving to Canada in 1991. After relocating to Winnipeg, Ewa earned a diploma with honors in Advertising Art and Computer Graphics and began working as a graphic designer until 2000. Since then she decided to devote herself to her art and quickly became an important member of the local art community. She passionately volunteers her time as a curator and as an instructor and mentor of younger artists. In 2007, Tarsia was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Statement

My work reflects the intimacy I share, and have always shared with landscape forms, abstract textures, colour, shape, and light. My sensitivity to these elements and larger arenas of life and nature is translated through the medium of printmaking and painting. In this artistic language I am able to animate my perceptions and explore the transience of time, the character of night and day, and memories of past seasons. The images that ensue are both documents and discoveries, bridged by the fundamental element of process.

The successive stages of my projects can be planned but never fully predicted, as they
depend on inner impulses and my interactions with the ever-changing environment.
In this negotiation the dictates of my emotions and thoughts steer the ship, reacting to,
but never surrendering to external circumstances. I do what I find important at a given
instant, and allow instinct to animate the direction of my work. Art-making is my vocation
and inspiration, and I use it as medicine and meditation.

All of my “green” projects are inspired by the feelings of caring about all living things, by the idea that human and natural environments can harmoniously coexist, and a strong conviction that such co-existence will enrich both spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of human life. In the age of synthetic trees and carbon credits, it is extremely important to remind ourselves that we have evolved in the midst of nature and that nature is an inerasable part of us.

Something about my dot and color…

My universe pulsates and coruscates with dots of colour and light. Since childhood I have been fascinated by intense bursts of color; by the dance of hues, shades, and saturation; by the drama of lime green splashed on Venetian red or the farce of blue dabbed on fluorescent pink. My sense of color comes not from juggling words in my mind, but from a constant, obsessive and almost physical, sensuous experience of pigment in the natural world. I imagine I can touch the greenness of my garden, hear the blueness of the sky, and smell the anxious brownness of the autumn leaves.

Colors are not merely visual but appeal to all the senses. They arouse deep emotions: they can infuse or drain energy, provoke to anger, bring joy, oppress, or calm and relax. And they are never static but combine with one another, like notes in a symphony, or arrange into schemes, gradients or contrasts. They are always alive with promise and potential, aesthetic and psychological.

Colors are at their liveliest, most dazzling, and most intense when condensed into a shape of a dot. Like the apple of my eye, a dot shapes my perception. It has become for me a symbol, a prism and a lens though which I see the world around me. My dot is a primal form of the earth, the sun and the moon, of every living creature, of my own self.

My world is crowded with dots; their profusion simultaneously unnerving and calming. They squeeze out the space that separates them and open up space on themselves: inviting smaller dots to ride and colonize them. Dots within dots within dots. Colour clashes with colour, luminescence competes with dullness, shades are in constant motion. Each dot is a new canvas on which I blend, and mix, and continuously experiment with colour; where I search for harmonies and discords, and where I strive to discover a new intelligence of colour.