The paintings of Olia Chama
Olia Chama is a personable, well-spoken, well-educated, artistically talented individual. Her creativity, open-mindedness, intelligence, vivid imagination, and keen sense of aesthetics combine with her intuitive sense of color and compositional organization. All of these qualities enable Olia to create exciting, beautiful, interesting paintings that are enjoyable to behold and to spend time with. Her paintings all have an internal consistency - the elements that make up her pictures blend together harmoniously.
Ms. Chama did not have any formal training in draftsmanship or color theory, but she spent much time visiting museums and she absorbed many artistic influences. Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning were Action Painters or Abstract Expressionists who taught her the love of the texture of paint and the freedom of the application of paint to the surface of the picture. The Surrealists and Magic Realists appealed to her spirit because they internalized their subject matter. The Surrealists tried to paint imagery from their subconscious minds while the magical realists painted scenes that appeared dream-like when completed. The French artist Henri Rousseau is an especially important influence. Rousseau (perhaps unwittingly) created his own special dream-like world, perhaps from his subconscious mind. Olia, like Rousseau, creates her own fairytales and fantasies and the people and stories that inhabit her paintings are from “the mythology of Olia,” as she refers to it. She can explain, in detail, the stories and myths that she uses as the subject matter of her pictures. She is making up her own fairytales and mythology, like the Surrealists were seeking to do, but unlike them, she is doing it consciously and knowingly.
Rousseau’s paintings looked like dreams; Olia creates myths. She prefers much more abstracted and abbreviated forms and figures than Rousseau’s representational depictions. Ms. Chama’s subjects - the myths, the people, the animals, the tulips and butterflies, the girl at the steering wheel, the garden with flowers - are important to her. The subject matter is the starting point of her painting. An idea or a form sometimes emerges while she is working on a picture, and she often incorporates this in her story or myth. Images such as faces, ladybugs, eyes or figures can be discovered within the compositions. The psychological richness of the painting is enhanced by these discoveries whether the artist intended to put them in or whether they appear fortuitously. Olia intends the subject matter of her paintings to have interesting images and contain layers of meaning and action.
Color is one of the key elements in Olia Chama’s work. She uses color expressively as well as decoratively. Her painting “Unicorn” has a beautiful rainbow array of pleasing colors, including blues, pinks, greens, and yellows, serving as the backdrop. Her painting “Tulips and Butterflies Trapped By Night” contains dark purples surrounding the objects to symbolize darkness and perhaps night terrors. “The Blonde At The Steering Wheel” has ominous patches of black and gray, frenetic lines of purple and white, and a dramatic area of electric yellow hair to create a tension which forbodes the accident about to happen in the myth. Olia chooses her color palettes to enhance her subject and the story that she is relating. Her color palettes are exquisite. She balances the colors throughout her compositions over the surface of her pictures. Olia incorporates black and white as important expressive, decorative, and structural colors in her compositions.
The paint is another key element in Ms. Chama’s work. The texture of the paint and the application of the paint are main ingredients in the pictures. Paint is applied in a variety of methods. Paint is sprayed and brushed on the background. The paint is sometimes applied thin and flat and at other times paint is applied thicker and shiny. A palette knife and other objects are used to apply some of the paint. Brushes of various sizes are employed to drip, slash, stroke, dab, dot, smear, glob and perhaps throw in a controlled manner the paint onto the surface. Brushes and other objects of varying size (including toothpicks) are used to create the swirling movements and webs, the staccato movements, the variegated patterns of the lines and swirls, the soaring thin lines, the frenzied lines and the entire vocabulary of motion, direction, and design. The thickness of each element, the amount of paint used in each line and the method of application of many of these lines and designs all play an important role in the overall composition as well as in the story that the painting is telling. For example, the thick black lines that roughly make up the face and its features and the thick heavily textured red paint that makes up the lips and mouth in “Wonder Girl Fatima” are essential to both the composition of the painting and to its subject matter.
The color palette, the texture, and the method of application of the paint, and the movement and design made by the paint and colors combine to form the composition of Ms. Chama’s paintings. The compositions are balanced although they are infused with a tremendous amount of excitement and swirling movement. “Wonder Girl Fatima,” “Unicorn,”
“The Blonde At The Steering Wheel,” and “Happy Family” are examples of how the main image is in the center of the composition and serves as the keystone element around which all else is structured. There is a harmonious classical balance to Olia’s paintings. “Quadrant” and “Tulips and Butterflies Trapped by Night” also display a balanced composition although there is no central image. She uses color and design effectively in her paintings to create the balanced harmony of the compositions.
Olia’s beautiful painting “Garden” is reminiscent of Gustav Klimt. It is more representational than some of her other work, but it still displays a major characteristic of Olia’s style which is her flattening of the pictorial space. She does not use linear perspective to build up depth and she does not use chiaroscuro and the modeling of forms. She creates depth with overlapping layers of design elements and the varying thickness of her paint within the same plane of her spatial design or layer.
Olia, as noted is very creative and intelligent, and these traits led her to experimentation. Olia is the first artist that I have come across that uses styrofoam as a medium to paint on. She uses canvas also and has tried wood, but she has discovered an enjoyable medium with styrofoam. She prepares the surface and paints upon it. The prepared surface takes the color brilliantly and is extremely light to carry and handle. She also paints styrofoam boxes with paintings on all sides inside and out as well as on the covers. The styrofoam slabs that she uses are several inches thick and she often likes to paint on both sides. “Unicorn” and “Wonder Girl Fatima” are painted back to back on one slab of styrofoam.
Olia Chama’s artistic sensibility is evident in every aspect of her life such as the interior decoration of her house, the arrangement of her garden, her propensity for writing poetry, and her successful creation of many exciting paintings. Olia has a wonderful intuitive sense of color blending and compositional balance that she displays in her paintings. She loves to create art and she uses her own fairytales and myths as her subject matter. She feels wonderful as she paints and feels that artistic inspiration flows through her as she works. She is an upbeat individual who converses intelligently about her paintings. She is filled with artistic talent and ideas which will surely result in many more brilliant Olia Chama paintings in the time to come.
Bobby Rothchild
September 2024