artistic spotlight...danielle ramirez.

danielle ramirez is also in her fourth year at mason gross and is a painter. going into the interview i had had some basic classes with danielle so i was a little familiar with her style...super clean. imaginative. playful. illustrative. i was interested to see some of her paintings and to see if her work had taken any new directions.

one thing i noticed immediately was her use of bold color in her paintings. she said she used to work with predominantly bright colors with minimal blending.














her work has since shifted to a some what cooler palette of blues in black with bright highlight spots. danielle attributes this to darker subjects in darker atmospheres. she works in oil and says her drawing history has created a lot of her painting style. she went on to tell me she's had some trouble with the bridge between drawing and painting because her sketches [which she turns into paintings] are very complete and exist how she wants them to look. she's sometimes runs into some difficulty getting her painting to match the vision in her head. more often than not she paints on canvas but recently she's been painting a lot on wood and sheet rock.

i was able to notice a clear difference in her painting and what she painted as an academic prompt. her work is very dream-like and imaginative. when i asked about he inspiration she said it was mainly raw human emotion. she attempts to illustrate emotion and make feeling a visual endeavor. to describe the process she says she takes a feeling and tries to think about how it looks. she's able to create a pretty clear visual which she then turns into a sketch and ultimately a painting. she says, "i think i have such trouble moving on the painting sometimes because i take so many steps...it's being removed so many times from the image in my head and the first image is the truest image." eloquent. she tries to resist the temptation to think about what the image feels like instead of just lo oking at the image because things can become to obvious and stray from the original vision.

danielle feels a connection to the work of artist amy cutler. she comments that they have a similar way of doing things and her illustrative style successfully conveys what she feels. danielle like cutler's style and concept and feels that they have something in common. when i asked about her use of music in the studio she responded saying that she uses it to block things out a lot. this helps her let her imagination work at its best and aid in visualizing a feeling.

danielle said that her childhood played big role in her life as an artist now. she always kept sketch books and they were often filled with drawings of mice [yes...mice] and characters she would create. she enjoyed drawing comics and i can definitely see how that's influenced her style today. at one point she lost contact with her art and her abilities. she developed a liking for fashion and had the urge to design. an open house at f.i.t. quickly made her realize that art school what the proper place for her. with some convincing of her parents she is now breathing, eating, sleeping and working as a mason gross student.

when i brought up the topic of these she seemed kind of intimidated by it at first but that started to disappear as the discussion went on. she wants to combine some of the things she's learned on her time in school, mainly silk screening. she feels screen printing works well with her heavy drawing style of painting. as mentioned, she sometimes has a problem turning her drawings into paintings and feels that this transition might be easier with the use of silk screen and elements of painting. danielle even spoke about her recent ability to knit and crochet and might even find a way to incorporate that into her thesis work. her subject matter for thesis will go back to "what [she] sees when [she] feels." she said this will likely involve the use of the figure. as far as sizing, she said she wants them to be pretty modest, in the 2' to 3' range, so she can use a lot of detail but remain intimate. post-graduation she wants to take a year off at least before she considers grad. school and hopes to move to philly. her job now has its biggest location in philly and she's hoping to be able to transfer there and continue her work as an artist, finding new people and inspirations along the way.