Painting her story A dialogue with Sandra Mack-Valencia 36 lic courier • march 2013 • www.queenscourier.com art profile BY ANGY ALTAMIRANO Holding a dialogue with her viewers with only her works of art, Sandra Mack-Valencia does more with images than most can do with words. Growing up in Medellin, Colombia, this artist was raised by a stay-at-home mom who taught her life’s important principles and values and a hard working father, who after his day job, would come home and paint until the sun went down. “I realized I wanted to be an artist, and specifi cally a painter, since I was very little. I vividly remember sitting by my father’s side with my little notebook and start drawing,” she said. “Now that his is not among us, it is very comforting to see him remembered through his paintings, and to visit friends and family and somehow, fi nd him there.” Enrolling in art school since she was 16, she found it hard to take another path that wasn’t the life of an artist, even though at times her father was not happy with her decision. “Once you know what you are , there’s little escape,” she said. Growing up she continued her education in the arts, where at times her knowledge came more from the issues occurring in the world around her, like political issues and strikes, than what was in the books. “We learned about passion, about sticking to your beliefs, about life, about controversy,” she said. Two years after coming to the United States, the thriving artist continued her education by getting a Master’s in Creative Arts at Hunter College in order to fi nd her way out of the path of just having to fi nd work to survive. “It was not easy, language and the fact that you did not belong here was a challenge, but going back to college did boost my dreams again,” she said. Mack-Valencia fi nds it hard to pinpoint a specifi c source of inspiration because she fi nds it in everything around her. She is inspired from images and words that might appear as fragments in her artworks to personal experiences that trigger a painting to begin as a whole on either a canvas or wood panel. “Experiences inspire me, stories that I hear in the news or I read in the papers inspire me, photographs that I fi nd in fl ea markets or just by going through the pages of newspapers inspire me. I keep in my studio hundreds and hundreds of images that I fi nd interesting.” One of her many paintings is called “I Can Hear You Coming” and is currently being exhibited at the “Long Island City Winter Show” at the Diego Salazar Gallery. This painting on wood panel was created in 2010 and followed the erotica connotation most of her pieces had at the time that speak to her experience of being surrounded by only men in her studio building in Long Island City and how they celebrated each other’s diff erences together. “I am a visual artist, I think with images, and at some point during the art-making process, I start and maintain a dialogue with the painting itself.”
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