REVIEW OF AESTHETICS AND FINE ART
Marcela Olivia Dorantes
Marcela Olivia Dorantes is an American emerging artist that works between London and Washington. She has been painting since early childhood. Marcela Olivia Dorantes' first memories of art stemmed from her grandmother an artist - theater, opera, and art. She examines the interactions of wildlife, domestic animals and humans to express the experience of expansiveness, intimacy, domesticity and remoteness through her keen sense of space, shape, color and form. Birds, bears, dogs, and felines represent unfettered spiritual creatures symbolizing the transcendence of prosaic life Prosaic life where technology has been rendered a witness of every moment of our lives. Using the versatility of color in her art is her exclamation of gratitude to the world and synergy of life. Marcela Olivia Dorantes 's art you linger on, art that you study, enjoy then come back for more.
Marcela Olivia Dorantes, Private collection, oil on canvas
The virtue of reverence, a way towards self-knowledge
The virtue of reverence is one of fundamental aspects of Marcela Olivia Dorantes's work. Evoking one of her paintings, she confides: "My paintings address the reverential relationship with our fellow species in an attempt to inspired the viewer with the feeling of connectedness. At this time when the rise of extinctions is clearly a crisis created by our pathological ways of consumption, my wish is to cast a nexus of care to involve animals and humans. We can choose to run with one another but toward what? Not death, we hope—as Schweitzer says, it is the nature of reverence for life to want to go on living—but transcendence".
Reverence inspires her work. Moreover, the virtue of reverence is the heart of a few of her paintings. According to Marcela Olivia Dorantes, Greek and Chinese societies put reverence in a central position in order to motivate the populace to act rightly and to be humble. Reverence improves both society and ourselves. Reverence is literally a vital attribute for us. We need to instill reverence into our lives because reverence gives us life. As the classicist Paul Woodruff puts it, "we feel awe for what we believe is above us all as human beings, and this feeling helps us to avoid treating other human beings with
contempt." For the Chinese, he notes, the concept of “li” links reverence to civility. We engage in reverence not because we are in church—instead, we engage in reverence as a kind of civility in moving through the world.
Albert Schweitzer came to believe, in a moment of inspiration or revelation, that “reverence for life” is a universal value in ethics. “Standing, as all living beings are, before this dilemma of the will to live, a person is constantly forced to preserve his own life and life in general only at the cost of other life,” he wrote. “If he has been touched by the ethic of reverence for life, he injures and destroys life only under a necessity he cannot avoid, and never from thoughtlessness.”
Marcela Olivia Dorantes, Reverence, oil on canvas, 24x30
An incomparable experience of the ocean
Marcela Olivia Dorantes describes her incomparable experience of the ocean: "My latest paintings have submerged themselves into my experience of the ocean, my human perspective when it comes to our human effect on the ocean, and my love for animals. Ocean is the mother of us all, and we must open ourselves up to our planet’s oceanic water, its surfaces and its depths, to properly revere our ocean, our animal life, and our ecosystem.
My work and my calling as a travelling artist has been driven my connection with animals, and this must include coming face to face with our sometimes distant but always necessary brethren in the sea. I am still riveted by my earliest memories witnessing the hatching of turtles hatchings near the seashore—this is why I am compelled to sing through my painting a requiem for the loss of shells due to acidity and sea creatures. The centrality of water united us all. I share the viewpoint of other artists (notably David Hockney) that our mission is to showcase beauty through the act of looking at other life in water, and seeing other beings in the water, and in seeing ourselves in the water".
Marcela Olivia Dorantes, At the edge of the ocean.On the beach.Below the waves, oil on canvas
When painting becomes a moment of enlightenment
Marcela Olivia Dorantes specifies her philosophical attitude towards the world around her: "I am an artist standing on a past-to-future continuum that is grounded in organic nature—art structured to move through and above inherent individual bias into the abstract and inherit beauty of the times we are witnessing, knowing we will be all right.
She tells us specifically what inspires her work: " Thematically, I am inspired by the music of Harry Styles in the song "Sign Of The Times.”
She continues adding her perspectives about her art: "My art manifests the free-falling from a state of discontinuity/disruption to equilibrium—translating potential energy into captured energy through creating, being part of the world. As an artist I can see London and the world in the translation process -- proceeding from a moment of discontinuity in which everything is possible as we advance toward Light and Movement"
Additionally, she explains how she becomes aware of our today's world: "We expand our perspectives by receiving Nature as human beings and by creating as artists. Famously, Delacroix depicts “La Liberté” guiding the people with a flag and a rifle. But once we achieve political liberty, we must turn to other symbols and forces in the larger natural world to liberate us. I find these symbols and
forces frequently the world of animals. My sense of the connection with nature and animals permeates my being when I paint. I experience this as breathing, and each brushstroke is a moment of enlightenment that nourishes my soul.
My art process requires, naturally, research about the subject matter—but sometimes it comes to me in dreams, which strike me as flashes of lighting in which the subject matter is revealed to me as a vision or insight. I explore this lightning imagery, using sacred geometry, sketching, preparing my paints or mixing grounds and then I spend my hours bringing my creations to life. I build on layers of underpainting that reinforce the brilliance of the colors I apply in subsequent layers. This incremental layering process enables me to expand beyond the rational mind. I love and breath my art, and I treat each brush stroke as a privilege and a moment of illumination!"
Marcela Olivia Dorantes, private collection, oil on canvas
An emerging artist attracted by the critics
"A flourishing magical realism permeates Dorantes's work, in the red orb of a sun hung low and pendulous in the sky, in the rose-tinted landscape, or the glow of the moonlight and the closeness of living creatures. There is little distinction between the inner and outer, the natural and man-made (flora and fauna wander freely across still lifes and through interior scenes. Dorantes's world is a tropical Eden where the human, the organic and the spiritual coexist without discord". Tara R. (Foundry Gallery)
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"Her paintings are whimsical, playful and the intensity of her painting is enchanting".
Sally Akridge
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"Marcela Olivia Dorantes paintings skillfully transmute the animal world into the symbolic world, reminding us of our bonds with the larger world and with all the other creatures in it".
M.G.
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