Noemí Estrada Tamargo.
Born Avilés, Asturias (Spain), 1977. Presently residing in Brittany, France.
Although presently residing in France, Noemi has spent most of her life in her home town, Avilés, a steel-producing industrial city in the north of Spain. Her early childhood interest in art was actively fostered by her working-class family, who actively encouraged her to draw and to keep diary-style notebooks full of inspiring ideas, including fictitious creative fantasies whose roots lay outside her day-to-day reality, often inspired by illustrated books and reproductions of paintings. Encouraged by example, Noemi grew up surrounded by the fruits of her family’s own creative leanings -scale modelling (ships, mostly), painting and poetry – while her father wrote science fiction. Noemi has practised various techniques such as pencil and pastel still-life drawing, sanguine-drawing, trois crayons, watercolours, comics and the occasional mural, although currently her preferred medium is oils.
“In recent years I have felt the need to do more complex works. Important changes in my life, such as maternity and moving from one country to another – Crete, Rhone-Alpes, Languedoc-Rosellón y Brittany, and in Spain Alicante, far from my native Asturias – have all been watershed moments in my life; maternity has made me want to get the most out of myself, and I have consolidated this change by moving country, adapting, and learning a new language. All these factors have contributed to a greater complexity in my work; with pastel techniques I have begun to work on a larger scale, and thence in 2018 to the use of oils. It is a technique I had only touched upon lightly during my academic years without ever getting involved in any depth, which means that for me it is a new medium, and I am teaching myself as I progress, processing all I have been able to learn from books and the occasional international workshop. I use different palates and am always trying to evolve, to develop my style, but really the most important factor in my work, the aspect which most interests me, is creation rather than technique… I try to scrupulously represent a truly personal vision of the themes I work on, avoiding modes, trends and fast art; for me art is a lifestyle, and an important part of finding out who I am, of getting to know myself and the world around me. At bottom, I try to recover the child-like sense of mystery inspired in me by those works whose reproductions held me fast, rapt in fascination. Ideally, I would like to achieve great painting, atemporal painting, although we do not seem to live in times sympathetic to such an ideal. Rather than paint in order to do studies for daily uploading, I try to treat each painting as if it could be a masterpiece. Doing studies is part of learning, but when I do them I am much more interested in what they could become, in the potential finished painting. My main theme is what my eyes see and my intelligence tells me about reality and the world around me, with special focus on beauty and feeling, on the representation of an intimate, poetic personal reality. “
Independent artist