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Sanda Iliescu Images | Images 2 | Images 3 | Images 4 | Images 5 | Images 6
 About my work My work is about the joyful act of drawing and painting. It is about something at once simple and mysterious: the delight of touching and shaping physical materials on a flat surface. What could be easier, yet more surprising, than drawing a line—letting it walk freely, meander gently or run wildly about? The journey of one's hand leads to shapes and outlines, to figures and fields of color, texture, or erasure. What started as a single point brings forth a world that is at once imaginary and very real. Give a child a stick and some wet earth and she will likely begin to draw. She might trace outlines of a shadow or make certain signs she knows, a circle or a letter. "Rabbit goes hop-hop-hop," she might say as she dashes the stick across the muddy ground. While playing with the resources available to her, she will invent certain rules for herself. Such rules interest me. As an adult, I find them engrossing and illuminating. Perhaps the hardest task of all is to maintain, along with rigor, a sense of play: a quirky connection to some other impractical and carefree world. Yet my work is also about the inevitable intrusions of the real world. It is about life's sudden twists and turns: about sorrow, survival, and need. In life, as in art, nothing is guaranteed. So my work is about resistances and failures, about the difficulty of reconciling certain acts. While I hope to retain a sense of playfulness and freedom, my work is equally about impossibility and an acceptance of conflict. While I delight in the peculiar paradoxes of the flat surface (its imaginary depth and insistent flatness, its dream-like remoteness and tactile intimacy), I am equally interested in its useful practicality, in the fact, for example, that hundreds of drawings can fit in a shoebox. So my work is also about a dislike of waste and excess, and an appreciation for economy: aesthetic as well as practical. It is about a desire to save remnants and incongruous bits, the flotsam and jetsam that life throws my way. Above all, my work is about making do with the modest materials of everyday life, with the resources that are close at hand. Why not make collages with common office staples? Or assemble a picture of a tree from plastic trash-bags? Why not paint with a blade of onion grass or make a drawing by walking through a field of snow? Or return, once again, to that most convenient of methods: paint on canvas. If the work of saving castaways and stitching them together in some fashion reveals a freshness and a fairness all its own, so too does watercolor, or ink on paper. Each in its way can reveal and clarify. Each can form a way. Making art is playful and also serious. Like other aspects of our lives, it includes chance and luck. If I am lucky, things that had appeared disjunctive become strangely congruent. The blade of grass becomes a satisfying drawing tool. Brushes become extensions of my fingers, and I paint as if with my own fingertips. In the end it does not really matters whether I work with grass or brushes or earth. What matters is the dance across a broad, expansive surface. The surface is a mirror of my life. It is my way to see and understand. It also becomes something apart from me: a clarification of, and perhaps a provocation to, a particular place and moment in time—to the situation in which I find myself. —Sanda Iliescu
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