For Victoria painting is a mystical experience. Every painting has its own energy and its own key, a myriad of color set to music. It has to have aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual order.
Victoria paints in a series because she has many interests. She is always drawn back to her great love – the American and European Garden Series. She has traveled to many beautiful gardens throughout the world. “New Mexico has some beautiful gardens too”, she adds, “We just have to work harder on them. I believe the Garden Series is a metaphor for living one’s life, I also enjoy tending the flowers and herbs in our own garden. I also use them for medicinal purposes and share them with my family and friends, just as my mother and grandmother have before me. My grandmother Victoria was a curandera”.
The Millennium Series is her latest endeavor. It is part of the garden series but more visionary, as if picking up on future events. Victoria says, “I never try to question what is going on in depth at this time or it will elude me. I allow this divine energy to pass through me. This energy of light and wind.”
The creation of a painting seems to go through four stages, not always in the order. The first is preparation which requires researching, setting up my palette, organizing my supplies, and getting into a painting frame of mind. The second stage is incubation: a rich source of ideas spills over from my subconscious while I am dreaming or when I am in the alpha state. These are impressions of where I have been and what I have felt. Many times these images from complete paintings, like solutions to problems or answered prayer. The third state is illumination or serendipity, a feeling of joy, excitement, and discovery with ideas beginning to get on canvas. The fourth stage is verification which involves technique, effort, and skill. Conveying an act of love is a natural manifestation of life.
Victoria Martinez-Rodgers is a member of the Artists Equity, Albuquerque Arts Alliance, and the Society of Layerists in multi-media. Her paintings hang in private collections throughout the United States and Europe.
http://www.coachgirl.com/yborart/oil/1800.htm