Document text
- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us October 27, 2005 Artist incorporates experiences from Brazil, India and New York’s Greenwich Village By Cindy Blankenship For the Tidings Jussara Luz Padilha’s work is now on display at Pilaf. Submitted photo Jussara Luz Padilha’s home, a gallery for her paintings and prints of angels, deities, collages and other playful, joyous, mystical and also very colorful art, brings a warm feeling to those who visit, she says. “People always say things like, ‘It makes me feel so warm and welcome, happy and calm,’ and that’s how I want my art to make people feel,” Padilha said. It’s fitting that Padilha’s middle name means “light” in Portuguese. Her art and her personality beam, as you may know if you met at her last First Friday at the Pilaf restaurant on the plaza where her exhibit of ethnic angels, deities and other colorful paintings and collages will remain on display through November. “I’m very connected with color. Brazil’s colorful ... India’s very colorful,” says Padilha, who was born in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil and also lived in India. “They are very daring with color in India. The sarongs, the textiles, they are very beautiful, but you have to be sensitive with colors you wouldn’t ordinarily put together or it will be chaotic instead of harmonious.” Padilha moved from Brazil to Greenwich Village in New York with her family when she was 10. “This was during the 60s,” she says, “My mother would take me to chanting and meditation groups, and there she’d be in her Chanel suit and high heels. We were an odd family.” Her mother was a healer in Brazil. Padilha learned how to meditate and how to pursue her own spiritual journey from her mother. They are now collaborating on a children’s book together. At 17, Padilha went to India with a spiritual teacher to an Ashram, a community, Padilha says, where participants lived, worked, gardened, danced and grew spiritually. Her mother joined her there for a while and after several years, Padilha moved to the island of Bali in Indonesia, then to the Bay Area in California, and from there to Ashland, shortly before her 14-year-old daughter was born. “Bali was very transformative. I’d always been a city person, but in Bali I lived in the mountains, with no electricity, no TV, and it was very beautiful. I gave up listening to music because I liked listening to the creek.” One of her original acrylics on canvas painted in Bali is hanging at Pilaf (on the Plaza) in the painom (smaller room). ARTIST SKETCH Name: Jussara Luz Padilha Age: “Guess.” Training: Attending Pratt Institute in New York on a scholarship, apprenticed in India with a jeweler, studied printmaking and lithography with Lyle Matousch at Southern Oregon University. Niche: Playful and colorful paintings and collages with a mystical theme. Inspiration: Nature. Also, poetry and music. “It’s called ‘Sleeping Ophelia,’” she says. “It’s a lot like where I lived with champa tree flowers (very fragrant flowers- white with yellow in the center) falling on the ground and the dark green tropical lushness all around along with the sound of the running creek, so wide and tumultuous. The dark nights were quite magical in their silence with the scent of gardenia flowers in bloom. That was a very special time for me.” Asked what she likes about Ashland, Padilha says, “It’s a small town and it’s got a lot of really good, open minded people. It has beautiful places to hike — I love the park — and it has good movies, foreign film festivals, theater, dance.” In San Francisco, she sold her greeting cards, but the process of gluing prints onto the cards is very time-consuming and not very financially rewarding, so she decided to focus on prints. She still makes a few greeting cards (some of them are at Bloomsbury), but most of her work entails creating paintings and collages and selling gicleé prints of these. “I loved Van Gogh, and he loved prints. He said that many people should be able to enjoy beautiful art, not just the wealthy but the middle class and the poor too.” Besides making prints of her paintings with a museum quality gicleé printer, she creates most of her collages on her computer where she also creates book covers and other graphic arts and has a beautiful Web site that, as she says, allows her to have her own gallery and sell her paintings at a lower price. Her current exhibit at Pilaf featuring ethnic angels and deities runs through October and November. She’s also shown at Howard Hansen Gallery and has had her art used by Earth Records on two of their albums. Her online gallery can be viewed at www.juart.com DailyTidings.com Home Page Archives | Revels | Classifieds | Real Estate Guide | Weather | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2005 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Deep Muscle Stimulator Free Music Downloads Slippers Ceramic Piggy Banks Online Casinos FREE Entertainment Guide Women's & Men's Slippers Accelerate Weightloss Products best online casino teleconferencing High-End Gaming Computers Diamonds Vegas Travel Guide Search Engine Optimization Sportsbook Discounted Website Hostings Student Loans Hotel & Airline Reservations African Safari Myspace Layouts Helzberg Diamonds Online Casinos Community Student Loans Bonus Casino ink cartridges Mortgage Calculator Security Systems Mailing Lists Canadian Pharmacy Casino Gambling Sites Backpacks Click Here .:Advertisements:. Site Search: RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams