Congratulations to Sandra Manzi for earning her place as a finalist in the 6th Edition!

Who are you?

I am a Canadian artist and always have had a passion to paint and draw. I was born and raised in Toronto and my parents immigrated here from Italy. When my guidance teacher was trying to find where I should go to high school, he looked at my grades and saw my highest were in art, so off I went and entered the art program at Central Tech in Toronto. This was the start of my formal art training and I was lucky to be starting it so early. I was drawing from a live model in grade nine and was taking many other art classes. I then went on to study at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto and also received a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Guelph. 

What inspired you to begin creating paintings? 

I started drawing like many children did which was by copying comic book characters, but I also had a passion for historical art which could have a lot to do with my dad being from Rome. I had been exposed to the Italian Renaissance masters and started appreciating their work at a young age. I remember for one of my high school projects, I did a copy of a Caravaggio painting in colored pencil. This really opened my eyes to the expressive potential of figurative painting and portraiture as a way of expressing myself through art. For the last thirty years, I've worked at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto where both contemporary art and the works of the old masters have always been there for me to look at. 

Can you discuss the inspiration and thought process behind "Behave"? 

When the pandemic put us all into lockdown in March 2020, I started thinking about how technology is now starting to take over our lives. Real-life experiences are being replaced by virtual ones. We are now seeing things through a screen so our senses are not seeing color, smelling or feeling things. The origin of my winning piece titled ‘Behave’ is from a series of paintings which started to explore this concept. I’ve always been a figurative painter but I think because of the pandemic and the fact that it was a long, cold, dark winter with not much human contact the figure just wasn't enough. I needed to start also adding color and texture. I’ve painted many portraits but with “Behave” I intentionally make the image hard to see. The obscuring of the figure has become a metaphor in my work for how staying in touch with our human emotions and senses within a world dominated by technology and social media is becoming harder and harder, its very essence is pulling us away from our human qualities. “Behave” is also an example of how I often use the female image as a starting point to explore such themes as femininity, notions of beauty, our disconnection to our bodies and nature, and our search for self.

Can you walk us through the physical creation of "Behave"?

I started taking pictures of a friend of mine during our workouts and she is the model I used for the portrait layer in “Behave”. Because of the pandemic, we are initially working out together virtually and my photos of her were screenshots. As the spring approached, I started taking pictures of flowers and foliage because I was just so happy to be able to get outside. Eventually, I started layering these pictures I took of my friend with these floral pictures. One day while watching a fitness trainers workout video I started taking many screenshots from the video and was interested in the way the image created a transparent layering when I randomly paused it to take the screenshot. This is how the origin of my new series of paintings started and what made me start experimenting with the possibilities of layering images and with the different degrees of transparency between the images. I had been going through an artist’s block in my artwork when suddenly a light bulb went off. But I wanted to add more color and various textures to my work. Then with the use of the tools available to me through photo editing software, I started playing and basically fishing for interesting shapes, colors and textures while manipulating the image and became addicted to the interesting patterns they created. When I was happy with an image, I would then print it out and use it as a reference for my paintings which are then all hand painted. I started with layering two images which eventually led to using three and sometimes four different layers. One day while cleaning and changing my palette I started taking photos of it. I was using aluminium foil as a palette for painting and as I crumpled it to throw it out, I liked the interesting splotches of paint mixed into the crumpled aluminium so I took pictures of it and started using it as one of the layers too. This really started to distort the portrait and floral layer by shifting expected color and form slightly in interesting and surreal ways for me and I liked the photos I started creating through photoshop based on this mixed layering of the figure, florals, and painted crumpled aluminium. I also started to experiment more with the different photo editing tools and started to use the erase tool to expose the layers underneath other layers. This also created a pattern that blended with the florals and gave it an artificial feel which I felt was analogous to ideas I was having of how the digital world was taking over our natural one. Taking different elements from each layered image started a whole new visual language for me. I started embracing modern technology as an element in my creative process while also critiquing its effect on us. Similar to how Impressionism rose to the challenge that photography created, I am rising to the challenge that the digital world has created.

 Your work has a delicate feel to it, can you discuss the artistic decision to do this? Is it on purpose?

My painting technique is a product of experimenting with the way technology can interreact with the traditional medium of oil paint. My work started taking on a delicate feel because the images started becoming very complex and intricate when I started layering images. I was challenging myself to not shy away from the detail in them, in fact, I started to relish them becoming more and more complex but it involved really having to focus and work with smaller brushes. But I’ve always enjoyed seeing brushwork so it became a battle of being expressive with my stroke while maintaining a sense of order so that I wouldn’t get my eyes lost in the composition while painting it. I started making my paintings more and more complicated with so many transparent layers which I did on purpose in order to get people to really have to stop and look - unlike the quickness of which we have become accustomed to by swiping through images on the internet. The pandemic changed so many lives and made us so aware of the power of human connection, especially with everything going virtual. 

What is the message you want to send your audience with your work?

Ultimately my work utilizes and embraces modern digital technology in its process in order to explore the human condition, and my paintings are the product of experimenting with the way technology can interact with the traditional medium of oil painting. I wish to send the message that we are still human and no matter what tools we use to express ourselves and how much we communicate through social media and the virtual world, and that no matter how many zoom meetings we may have there is still a human being behind it all - making the choices they make and communicating and expressing themselves as they navigate through their world.

What do you feel is your most successful piece to date? Why?

I think my most successful piece to date is the painting titled 'Queen Georgia'. I feel like this is the painting where I really started seeing what I've been wanting to express come together. This is the first painting that contained more than four separate layers that came together so well for me. There was the layer containing the main portrait, then the flower layer, then the painted aluminium layer, then finally the layer where I used the erase digital editing tool in photoshop. Also, I think it's because I no longer felt like I needed to hide the portrait to make it more expressive and mysterious. I could still express everything I've been trying to express with a bolder more obvious image if I wanted to.

Can you talk about your biggest learning experience during the process of creating your paintings?

My biggest learning experience has been that sometimes you just need to keep forging ahead with what you’re doing. Trust your instincts that you started something for a reason which will come to you eventually. As long as you constantly keep an internal dialogue going with your work it will all make sense to you. You just need to trust yourself. During the process of creating, you’re always trying to solve problems because it doesn’t always go smoothly. Just because some artist paints a certain way or just because you’re told in art school that this is how you’re supposed to do it doesn’t mean those things will work for you. I failed in a few paintings early on by not trying to solve problems. I tried painting like artists I admired and couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working for me. It’s because I’m not them so I needed to solve the problem to make it work for me. This is still a work in progress but I’m getting better at it.  

Can you discuss your biggest success since starting your artistic journey?

My biggest success has been in realizing that my art is unique whether the subject matter is as simple as a portrait or more complex. It is ultimately made by me and no one else therefore it is about my life, my thoughts and my own feelings. I also learned that you can be just as expressive with a small paint brush as you can with a big one. Small tight gestures can be just as expressive as big swooping ones...especially in the hands of an artist that is in tune with their visual vocabulary.

What projects are you working on currently? Can you discuss them?

Currently, I'm just starting to work on some ideas for a series of paintings that were inspired by a recent trip to Italy. I spent time in Florence, Venice and Verona and gathered a lot of reference photos of the works of the Renaissance masters from the Uffizi and other galleries I visited. I'm just starting to experiment with ideas of blending the old with the new and manipulating it with the tools from photoshop.

What is your dream project or piece you hope to accomplish?

 I haven't started a painting yet as these are currently in the preliminary ideas stage, but my dream project would be to create a body of work that successfully references and combines elements of art from our past with our present lives, finding commonalities in subject matter and re-examining them using modern technological tools such as the ones found in the photo and digital editing software. 

Lastly, I like to ask everyone what advice they would give to their fellow artists/photographers, what is your advice?

My advice to my fellow artists would be to make art that you think you can keep doing for the rest of your life. Just paint what you enjoy painting plain and simple, not what you think will sell. There is a great quote from the Canadian artist Robert Bateman which is -“If you market target your art, it is a sure way of becoming a nobody. You join the hundreds of others reploughing the same furrow and don’t express your unique self”. I also believe that inspiration is all around you. Sometimes I just take random photographs of things and ponder them later. If ideas come to me when I do, I can then go back and take more pictures. That’s the great thing about a cell phone is you can do that without any commitment to one image. I treat my cell phone and all digital technology as my sketchbook.  And one more thing is that even though it’s hard not to look at what other artists are doing it’s best to stop looking for a period of time – this is when you will discover the unique qualities of your own work. 

To view more of Sandra Manzi’s work

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