Úrsula Romero
How would you describe the direction your work is taking at this stage?
After 23 years of painting, I have seen that my work continues to occupy the distinctive territory between contemporary painting, symbolism, autobiography and psychological image-making. I appear to be developing a visual language in which flowers, plants, the human figure and fragments of my personal history become vehicles for exploring themes of longing, grief, transformation, ageing, identity and collective memory. After years of watercolour botanical painting, the work is starting to morph into new directions. In 2019, whilst painting blue sun orchids in NW Tasmania I started to use oil paints and this marked the biggest leap I have ever made away from traditional flower painting techniques. Then in 2021, I made the drastic decision to bury my alter ego Inky Leaves and to put all of my previous works in a ‘meta tomb’ in order to re-invent myself as Úrsula Romero. By doing this, I escaped the pigeon hole of the algorithm whilst killing the ego. I surrendered to the evolution of my artistic journey.
Although botanical imagery has long been associated with my practice, I have never been a true botanical painter. To call me this would be to misunderstand the nature of my work. In my paintings, flowers rarely function as botanical subjects in their own right. Instead, they operate as symbolic forms, carrying emotional, psychological and cultural meanings that extend far beyond the natural world. Leaves and flowers become a symbols through which my personal experience is revealed. I use flowers and leaves as a muse to tell her my autobiography.
Since setting up a studio in Andalucía, my work has evolved quickly and dramatically. I am no longer concerned with representation, but with the transformation of inner experience into image. Spain is a country with a rich history of art and of painting in particular, and I find myself naturally drawing upon these influences, from Goya’s psychological ambiguity and El Greco’s spiritual distortion. The violence of the light in Southern Spain makes the shadows even darker and this has influenced my painting style.
Currently I am developing a collection on my mid-life. The collection raises questions on grief, loss and crises – both personal and collective.
Úrsula Romero | Air | 2019
You established your studio in Andalucía after leaving the UK. How have the landscape, light, cultural history, and painting traditions of Southern Spain influenced your visual language?
I set up a studio in Granada, Andalucía in 2014 in order to focus on my painting more. After five years of living in London, I was beginning to get lost in the noise and ached for some space and peace. What I didn’t realise is how this move would change the way I paint and think about painting. My paintings started to find their own narratives and ideas. My first collection Leafscape documented the disorientation I felt moving between two countries. Inspired by the brightness of the sun in Granada and the darkness of its cast shadows, I also started lighting my subjects differently – spot lights got closer and the sun was more intense and the leaves just started popping off the page.
After Leafscape, I started Blaue Blume and again I noticed that Andalucía was influencing me. I started under exposing everything to make things darker. I added deep black space and worked in a tenebrist style akin to Mediterranean painters centuries before me. I visited galleries in Madrid and became entranced by the baroque and by artists such as Ribera. Twelve years on, Spain just keeps feeding me. I am now totally absorbed in the work of Goya. I feel very lucky to be here.
Leafscape was an important earlier project in your artistic development. Looking back, what aspects of that project continue to influence your current paintings, even as your practice has moved in a new direction?
Leafscape was indeed a very important moment in my career. It began when I partially moved to Spain part time and documented the disorientation that came with this experience. At this time in my career, I was very influenced by the painter Rory McEwen who was known for painting decaying leaves on large sheets of stretched Kelmscott vellum as well as the work of Peter Greenaway. The way I enlarged the leaves to a massive size was an intuitive decision on my part and the obscuration of the leaves extending beyond the frame, was again intuitive. But the effect was fantastic. The oversized leaves dwarfed anyone who looked at them. The collection was allegorical in that it had many meanings. In 2017, I mostly discussed the collection of works as bring up an ecological debate – plants living on the edges of civilisation and of the paper. The collection came with a soundtrack using the sounds I recorded from each location where I found a leaf. The track itself was dystopian and confusing in its composition, with sounds from England and Spain being mixed together. One minute you were hearing the bells of Big Ben or a police siren, the next clanging bells from goats grazing in the pastures of Granada.
As time has gone on, I have come to understand that Leafscape was equally an autobiographical story of me jumping between countries and worlds. I was stretched beyond borders and the borders of the frame. The leaves were magnified to such an extent that their surfaces began to resemble maps, revealing inner landscapes within their edges. The dystopian sounds were my own head, full of the noise.
When I completed Leafscape, I vowed not to paint a leaf ever again, but alas, I find myself continually going back to them. I am clearly still grappling with my inner landscape and questioning where I belong. Leafscape still influences a lot of my work today. I still make soundtracks to sit with my paintings, I still make books and I still paint over the edges of the frame. I also have carried on my lighting techniques across to my current work. However, I am enjoying painting in a different way. Blaue Blume began the thought process of negative space, transparency and of layering, which is now being deepened in my latest collection of works.
Úrsula Romero | Collision | 2019
How has the meaning of the blue flower changed for you since you began the project in 2017?
Rooted in the spirit of the Romanticists who crossed continents in search of poetry, this body of work drifts between botany, dream and remembrance, where sight and sound blur their boundaries. Each painting traces a journey across the world in pursuit of rare blue flowers. The meaning of the blue flower hasn’t changed, but it has been explored and deepened in the 21st Century. The paintings speak quietly of evolution, both human and botanical. Our eyes, shaped by survival, struggle to register blue fully, and so the colour hovers at the edge of seeing. It is sensed more than observed. This partial blindness mirrors the limits of knowledge itself, where the most vital things remain just beyond reach, shimmering and unstable. Blaue Blume reflects on borders drawn by human hands and the quiet violence they inflict on the natural world. These lines interrupt migrations, fracture habitats and impose rigid order on systems that thrive on movement. Wars, pandemics and Brexit all occurred during this eight-year snapshot in history. Ultimately, the Blue Flower calls for wandering and becoming lost, for crossing thresholds and briefly disappearing. It suggests that freedom begins where certainty dissolves. Above all, there is a radical tenderness at the heart of the work. It asks us to make friends with the unknown rather than conquer it. That is the true meaning of Blaue Blume. it always has been and always will be.
Blue can carry many emotional and symbolic meanings, from melancholy and distance to spirituality and transcendence. What does the colour blue represent within your work?
The Colour blue represents all of these things that you have listed in my work. It doesn’t represent any one thing. Blue is ambiguous. Blaue Blume is a wandering. It follows the blue flower of Novalis, that impossible emblem which appears only to vanish like a dream, leading us away from certainty and into longing. Blue, elusive by nature, resists both pigment and perception. It is problematic for plants to produce and difficult for humans to hold. Few living forms are willing to expend energy on a colour that offers no clear gain or advantage. Like Heinrich’s flower, it dissolves under direct light, slipping from the grasp of reason and refusing to be named.
The search for the Blue Flower and the colour blue becomes both personal and historical. It is a record of a time lived, travelled and endured. A quiet witness to forces that interrupt movement and silence desire. At the same time, it celebrates the persistent human need to roam, to imagine distant horizons and to step beyond the known. In the words of Rebecca Solnit ‘one never arrives in blue’. Blaue Blume offers no conclusion. It leaves the door open. It asks us to linger in uncertainty, to trust the intelligence of dreams and to recognise the natural world not as a resource, but as a teacher. In following the blue flower, we do not arrive. We remain in motion, attentive, unfinished, and free.
Úrsula Romero | Hades | 2019
How do you approach the process of building colour, atmosphere and depth in your oil paintings?
I work in montage mostly. I have an archive of symbols and motifs in my studio and in my mind and I work to piece these together in unusual ways. My mother, Kitty Shepherd, works in a similar way with her ceramics and I think either we have the same type of brain, or I learnt it from her. Atmosphere is mostly created by studying the techniques used by the Masters over the history of art and developing upon them. This is the language of art and the hidden conversation between painters over Centuries. As a painter, you can easily have an invisible conversation with Caravaggio or Rembrant or Bacon. You just need to look at what they did and evolve it. I use light and shadow a lot in my work to create atmosphere, but I also manipulate scale. I am also very conscious of colour. With Blaue Blume I found myself very quickly changing the way I managed the white negative space produced with traditional watercolour botanical painting techniques, filling in the space with black or blues to accentuate the blueness of the flower. Recurring themes within my practice include obscuration, fragmentation and manipulation of scale. Figures, flags, doors, leaves and flowers are partially concealed, forms extend beyond the frame, and elements are deliberately withheld from view. These strategies reflect my interest in the incomplete nature of memory, the tension between what is visible and what remains hidden, and the way meaning is often found in absence as much as presence.
During the pandemic, you created Los Pensamientos, a work consisting of 197 pansy flowers. How did this project emerge, and why did the pansy become the central symbolic form through which you responded to that period?
Between the years of 2020 and 2021 my project Blaue Blume was put on hold as I couldn’t travel anywhere. At the time I was living alone in the Sierras de Tejeda, Almijara y Alhama. A pretty remote but beautiful place. As soon as lock down started, I found myself painting a small 15 x 15cm pansy. It was bigger than a life size pansy, but small for my usual scale. In all honesty, it felt a bit like that moment when Tom Hanks makes a face from his bloody hand print and decides to call his football ‘Wilson’. The pansy had a face, like those in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. In lockdown, I had become Alice.
Before long I had painted a series of these faces and I put them up for sale and they were popular. It appears everyone wanted a little happy face. In Italy, the pansy is known as ‘flammola’ (little flame), and I rather like that. A little flame of hope. Hope in the dark. They are petals of nostalgia, happy flowers. Gateways, representative of the portals of our hidden transformations as we sheltered in our houses from Covid-19.
As time went on, the project changed and I decided to paint 197 different pansies and stop at that number, because there are 197 countries in the world. I titled the finished piece Los Pensamientos after the Spanish name for pansy as not only was I in Spain during this historic moment, but the name, akin to the French ‘Pensée’, has a double meaning for ‘thoughts’ and we were all locked up, stuck with our own thoughts. In the language of flowers, a pansy also means that someone is ‘thinking of you’ and is often used as a get-well flower to show that you sympathise with someone’s pain and distress. In this case, the sympathy went to an entire country. Each pansy in this piece was painted individually on a 15 x 15cm square and was posted to a recipient somewhere in the world. The finished posie of 197, is the complete collection of all of these tiny scattered paintings. Masquerading in the final digital piece of 200, I included three imposters, who have appropriated the pansy patterns to go unnoticed, akin to a virus. The final piece is 300cm x 150cm.
Úrsula Romero | Sirena Voladora | 2019 – 2022
Sound has accompanied several of your major painting projects, including Leafscape and Blaue Blume. What can sound communicate alongside a painting that the visual image cannot express on its own?
When you start to listen, you begin to ‘see’ things differently. When you listen properly, you instantly become present in time and space. Processes slow down and one becomes acutely aware. You find yourself merging with the landscape and you begin to see how even your own body influences the way sound waves move. I have in the past been interested in how a painting could hint at a sound to produce an experience that is beyond visual, or in fact, audible – to tap into something that is spiritual. There have been times when I see a painting and the artist, being a master of brush and composition, ushers me into a space where I hear sounds – imaginary ones. In this sense, a painting can be seen as a theatre, transcending its material form into something else entirely, something ethereal, such as a story or a feeling.
Sound renders the object dynamic, it makes what we see quiver with life (Voegelin, 2010)
For both of my collections Leafscape and Blaue Blume, I have produced soundtracks. For Leafscape, I worked with composer Derek Thompson create a piece that featured all of the sounds I recorded from the sites where each leaf grew. For Blaue Blume, I have done the same, recording all the sounds from every country I visited. I do this to extend the nervous system of the painting and what it can achieve as a call to action ecologically, but the CDs also function as stand-alone pieces. The main story arcs are always about belonging and the relationship between plants and humans – how we interact with our environment and how our environment interacts with us, and I believe very strongly that this story cannot be told with pictures alone.
The blink of an eye lasts three hundred milliseconds. The blink of an ear lasts considerably longer. From birth to death, the ear never closes. Kim Cohen (2009)
There aren’t many people who pay attention to the sounds and often when they do, sound is left to enhance another sensory output and never left to singularly become. Yet, the invisible and the formless world must be given equal validity in order to transform the visible and the formed. This is basic alchemy. This is how one can belong to the world fully. We all have invisible souls that grow into something intangible but in the modern world this seems to be unrecognised. We are all living in a world which overly taxes the left hemisphere of our brains. Our languages and our systems rarely tap into the right side – the ‘acoustic’ side – of our brain, and as our existence is becoming progressively more ‘wired up’, this is becoming increasingly so. I believe that by using pictures and sound we begin to use the other side and become more responsive.
The auditory world is always dynamic and never static and in order to really understand sound, you have to realise that you are part of it. You are inside a soundscape. This is how I try to ‘see’ when painting – I try to feel the space around as if I am part of it. I try to sense the distances between the object and myself and convince myself that they are not really there – there is no distance, it’s an illusion. Sound’s ephemeral invisibility frequently means it is ignored. Ever heard of the saying ‘seeing is believing’? It seems that there is this absurd belief that to see things is to understand things.
The unsettling thing about sound is it breaks down the ego. For example, if we hear a noise then we are instantly part of that noise – we share the space and the moment with the noise. There is no distance between us because sound happens inside of us in the ear and brain – there is no distance. So rather disturbingly, you get the melding of space and time inside of you. You become a vessel; you become the landscape, the environment between this world and the one that existed before.
Úrsula Romero | Leaf | 2016
Your book Blaue Blume brings together several years of artistic research and development. How does the book relate to the paintings, and what experience do you hope it creates for the reader or viewer?
My upcoming publication ‘Blaue Blume’ will feature the entire collection of paintings made during my eight-year project. As with all my publications, I curate the book to be a piece of art in itself, giving my audience the chance to own something collectible and precious. The book is lay-flat bound, which allows the landscape paintings to cover a double page spread without the indentation of a sewn spine, which allows the artworks to be fully appreciated in their entirety, un-interrupted. The book is presented in a blue velvet covered, embossed slipcase and every book in the edition of 500 is signed and numbered by me. I love producing books because they extend beyond the exhibition space, allowing the art works to be taken into the home without the enormous cost. People can enjoy my work from the comfort of their own homes and explore the collection quietly and slowly in their own time. The format of books offers something different to an exhibition or images on a screen. This particular publication is organised into geographical regions and describes my journey using my art works. Blaue Blume essentially is a project on space and the journey of the soul and mind. My previous collection titled ‘Leafscape’ was more about time, but both look at issues such as what it is to belong, life’s journey, travel and our own inner landscape. My hope with Blaue Blume, is that it will bring the hidden and mysterious beauty of our world to people’s laps.