Works & Themes

To comment briefly about my painting, I would like to say that it is rooted in personal experience. I look for beauty not only in the traditional sense but also trying to reach an original way of expression.

Island. Watercolour, 45 x 45 cm, 2011. Colección Privada.

I love to paint flowers and landscapes as I admire their beauty that we can compare to the beauty of the human body. But I think that it is impossible to recreate nature perfectly. In my opinion an artist can only emulate it as nature becomes a new reality through his/her hands and mind. This new world is what the observer can appreciate looking at the work and feeling the mystery that the paintings embody.

Typhoon series II. Mixed media, 50x35 cm, 2010. Colección Privada.

I have developed my work around various themes and have investigated techniques such as watercolour, oil painting, engraving, wood block printing, pastels and Japanese painting, among others. Through my paintings you may appreciate different approaches. I produce series of figurative works as well as abstract paintings where colour and shape denote vividness.

"Bleached, purged, chastened,

Under the snows, under the ice, jagged, sharp,

Cold green and blue,

White darkness,

Under the clouds, the flat grey, horizontal, trammelled,

Live, still life."

Richard Robbins, Moment, Richardson Press, London, 1988.

I remmember here a beautiful poem by Richard Robbins, one of my dearest teachers, who always encouraged me to follow a personal path within the expression that painting allows us.

Statement

Painting is a way of expression beyond words. Something so simple is, on the other hand, difficult to assimilate for those who paint. Because painting is a need, not a choice. Among the diverse means of expression I could choose, whether I sculpt, paint, weave or write, I create an object, an image, whose usefulness is not immediate. Only after some time can I appreciate its value, even its ability to enter unknown corners of my personality and exercise its healing power.

Technique, color, shape and composition are basic and essential elements for creation but not the aim of the work. I choose the theme and the technique according to my need to express an idea or feeling but it is expression that gives soul to the painting.

In this level I exercise my ability to “say without words”, bringing together technical and conceptual elements. From expression the true meaning of painting is aroused, which is no other than the encounter with myself by means of the interaction with the surrounding world. Because painting requires moments of introspection and isolation but expression is a collective act; there is no expression without a potential viewer, nor can we create only from within our internal world.

In this way, I am a witness of my own time but I cannot reject the influences that the meaning of art had in other epochs or for different cultures, though I can choose. Art answers to a vision and I choose abstraction or figuration according to the best way to express a feeling, a thought about daily life or a fantasy. In some works semi-abstraction, which is the combination between figurative elements and pure abstraction, has given form to the world I wanted to recreate and share.

Isabel Jiménez, 2010.

Please visit the Spanish version to see more of my work.

If interested in Japanese culture and language visit Nihongokeshiki