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Charisse Abellana

Artist Statement

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My medium of choice is oil on canvas. I am a contemporary still life and landscape artist. I am very much a colorist and purist with emphasis on extremely vivid and bold colors made even bolder with thick and rich palette knife strokes. I lean towards impressionism. I have no set still life themes. Anything that inspires me, I paint - how light strikes a vase or a petal, how the intense color of a flower enlivens me.

Art has always been an innate part of me. This passion, however, was hampered while growing up in the Philippines, a country where dreams not born out of the need for survival seldom come true. Because of how life had unfolded itself for me, this passion was reawakened when I felt a deep love lost. Although my children are my driving force, I needed something to lift me out of the darkness then. I then drove myself to feverishly learn painting and consume art in a relatively short time. It then unraveled into this wonderful, enlightening and invigorating journey to rediscovery. And with me are my children, my husband and my art.

I have studied a variety of mediums - charcoal, pastels, a little of watercolor and I am strongest at oil paints.

Painting for me is like falling in love and being in love - sometimes intense almost painful, at times calm and mellow, but always very beautiful. Anything can inspire me. It is in what I see and in what I feel. It can be the boldness of a color, the dance of light striking an object or mountain, the softness and fluidity of a fabric, the strong and masculine lines that I see.

Art touches each spectrum of my innermost persona. Every time I am given the opportunity to share what emanates from inside me through my art and touch a person's soul, that for me, is fulfillment.