Bouquet of tulips and cat. Oil on linen year 2022. 89 x 100 cms.
As an artist I am inspired by life in cities, the characters that inhabit the environment in different parts of the world influenced by architecture and nature.
As an artist I am inspired by life in cities, the characters that inhabit the environment in different parts of the world influenced by architecture and nature.
“If I live, I will paint a lot of flowers” – said the Spanish painter María Blanchard in the last moments of her life. I heard this phrase on the radio while I was writing these lines about the work of the Colombian painter Claudia Hernández. I immediately incorporated it into this text, giving it the title. Because flowers in works of art have a meaning, and I have seen them grow on Claudia Hernández's canvases in a very remarkable and enigmatic way over the years. I dare to analyze in these lines, with her permission, the meaning of that "floral invasion" in her paintings.
When I saw her paintings for the first time 22 years ago, in Madrid, her large format portraits, so beautiful and serene, and her architecture from a bird's eye view/ and her depictions of architectures from a bird's eye view, which reflected modern buildings, caught my attention. and imposing. I don't know when the flowers began to grow in her paintings, to gain, little by little, centimeters on the canvases, softening the human creations. I only know that I was intrigued to see how God's creations gradually won the game over man's creations.
A few days ago I saw a painting of hers on her social networks in which almost everything was nature and architecture had passed into the background or third plane. From the window of her current studio in Bogotá, you can see the distant mountains; on a closer plane, the captive vegetation of the city can be distinguished, and already inside the studio, the flowers and a cat were left with the lion's share. By the way, nothing is more difficult than capturing the grace of a cat on canvas, because they are elegant and enigmatic creatures that almost always escape fixed representation. And yet the line and the subtle painting of Claudia Hernández achieve it without apparent effort. It is another great triumph of the natural world over man-made artifice.
But why do the flowers grow in this way in the paintings of this notable Colombian painter? Could it be that the artist expresses her longing for the natural world in this way? Perhaps the excessive cement of Madrid did not move him to paint flowers and her contact with Colombia did? My theory is that love of the natural world represents a very Franciscan, very Celtic type of spirituality. The Franciscans feel in nature as in the lap of the Creator. And not only them, of course, because when the biblical prophets wanted to meet God they left the cities without a soul and got lost in the desert and in the mountains. And in Claudia Hernández's paintings I see that impulse, and also a lot of love for life and beauty. And with this I return to the beautiful phrase from the beginning:
If I live, I will paint many flowers.
Text by:
Fé Saldaña Ruiz de Velasco