A woman and her craft: Aida Tomescu

Bright, vibrant and exciting is how I describe the work of artist Aida Tomescu. I started following her work several years ago and liked it so much that it inspired me to try to create a similar type of painting on my own. A task far more difficult than I anticipated. The texture and colours in her images speak to the spirit of Australia. The intensity of the colours represent the strength of the sun, the forcefulness of the sea and the rich and textured depth of the earth. Travel and experience Australia and you will appreciate each reference. It is unforgettable.

Aida exhibited in Melbourne at Niagara Galleries in 2008. The following are excerpts from comments about her work on the gallery website.

'Contrary to the fleeting glance they are not works about texture, nor indeed purely formal qualities of painting. They are more essentially related to the artist’s sense of poetic construction, where mood, movement, vibration, the linkages of brushstrokes across the surface and their special behaviour forms a particular experience. '

‘I like titles that wander between various language systems and could 

mean different things; titles that harmonise with the general visual character of the works, but remain open, elusive and multiple.’

'Each in some way echoes a textual reference evoked by the calligraphy contained within the general visual character of its image.'

'Tomescu sees herself following the work as is travels the distance towards a new identity; ‘unfixing’ forms as it were, that they might be allowed to expand.'   

                                              

Aidu Tomescu

Born in Bucharest, Romania, Tomescu has lived and worked in Australia since 1980. She was the inaugural winner of the prestigious LSFA Arts 21 Fellowship in 1996. Subsequent winners of the LSFA award have included Imants Tillers, Mike Parr, Akio Makigawa and Fiona Hall. Aida was the winner of the Wynne Prize in 2001, and in 2003 she won the Dobell Prize for Drawing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Her work has been collected by many important public and private collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of Modern Art at Heide and the National Museum, Bucharest.
Images from Australian Art Collector Magazine and Niagara Galleries http://www.niagara-galleries.com.au/artists/artistpages/theartists/aida_tomescu/tomescuframe.html