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Vera Tcherassi's oil-on -canvas work offer us the gifts of color and texture in their purest forms. Broad, generous strokes of freely applied paint form harmoniously complex visual landscapes. Raw and unpretentious, these compositions arise spontaneously as a result of satisfying the sensitivity of the eye, without sacrificing the pictorial matter for the demand of a preconceived figure or stylistic notion.
In the true spirit of abstraction, her creativity is the end-result of hands and eyes working together to evoke and control the visual response, rather than a reasoned application of color and texture to satisfy a pre-established formula. Consequently, the current exhibition is a masterful demonstration of unfettered expression. These are paintings that are ultimately limited only by the soul's intimate life force's ability to manifest itself in the physical world, through paint. The level of depth and sophistication represented by these abstractions can only be surpassed by the beauty and energy of the visual harmony, and the subtlety of the ultimate message of the composition which can only be reveled directly by the canvas to the eye.
Vera Tcherassi was born in Barranquilla, Colombia. In 1997 she moved to the United States, living and painting in many different cities including Berkeley, CA; Pittsburgh, PA; San Diego, CA; and most recently, Ann Arbor, MI. She has been painting for over 10 years, and her work is in many private and corporate collections in San Francisco, New York, Miami, San Diego, Ann Arbor, as well as in Colombia.
"My paintings freeze a moment of time in a harmony of colors, Beauty often manifests itself unknowingly and unpredictably, everyday and everywhere. Abstract art physically captures such manifestation of beauty as it happens and when it happens, for contemplation and enjoyment."
"Our eyes have two modes of seeing: passive and active. Passive seeing is what we do most of the time, when we are relaxing at the cafe. or when we are viewing a landscape. Active seeing is what we do when we are looking for something that we have lost. As I paint, I am actually searching for beauty and I will not be satisfied until I find it. I paint in active eye mode."
"Expectations not only guide but also limit artistic expression. We expect a waterfall, for example, to be painted with vertical brush strokes in the direction of falling water. However, as our eyes view a landscape, they are continuously moving from one focal point to another. Visual perception is a dynamic interplay of the eye and the scene. Beauty is often evoked by the way our eyes move as we look. But a great painting can also capture the dynamic nature of a visual impression, unconsciously making the viewer believe he is gazing at a scene."
"Abstract art often presents us with this contradiction: the beauty of a part being greater than the beauty of a whole. In art, beauty is fractal."
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