Worlds Collide
Travel in Asia and elsewhere has been my inspiration for the last decade or so. On the road, I complete numerous small figurative paintings in watercolour. Back home, I work bigger, bolder, and more experimentally with mixed media. I reclaim interesting materials from the local dump to reuse in my work: bubble wrap, spackle, eggshells, sand, newsprint, and much more.
My soul “sings” when I work abstractly. I push myself to stay loose and spontaneous. When the abstract piece works, I leave it alone. When it lacks pizzazz, I superimpose images on top allowing the underpainting to shine through and creates magic. This gives an ethereal/mystical quality to my work.
My mission is to paint beauty and to leave something to the viewers’ imagination so that they are not only “engaged” by my work, but it is also to finish what I start.
My response to cruelty, suffering and sorrow is to remind the world of the face of beauty, which can restore our tranquility, cleanse our hearts and lead us to the path of truth.
Beauty is a tonic like no other.
Shirley Mancino --------- Paintings with Panache 