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Ilyana Martínez
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Biography
Watercolour, gouache, ink on paper
16” x 20" (matted)
Ilyana Martínez was born in Toronto to a Mexican father and Canadian mother and raised primarily in Mexico. She studied at the Nova Scotia and Ontario College of Art and Design. Since graduating, Ilyana has been in a number of exhibitions in Toronto, Montreal, Victoria and Regina. At the 2005 Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, she received Honourable Mention for watercolour. While at OCAD, she received a W.O Forsyth Scholarship, a Drawing and Painting Faculty Award and a Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour Honour Award.
Ilyana currently lives and works as a designer and artist in Toronto.
Artist's Statement
My current series of work "Urban Planting" reflects the environment in which I live, a fusion of two contrasting worlds. The natural realm is alive with endless growth, sprouting seeds, clinging roots, plants, and dirt. The built environment of our city is a fabricated one, of structures, wires, grids, concrete, and geometry.
In the paintings, organic and constructed shapes emerge and dwell beside and within one another to form imagined places, where budding cities hinge as fragile structures. Buildings sway above in clouds and from blades of grass. Minute networks cluster and attach themselves to plants, while populations scatter among rivers of invented maps. Nature refuses to die and the man-made world comes alive, as one fuses with the other.
While walking in the city’s centre and parks, I observe and collect sensations from the spaces around me. These encounters with the environment appear in the shapes and lines of paintings that are intuitively created. Simple forms such as a seed fascinate me with their microcosmic worlds, while the complexity of urban life draws me to imagine alternate possibilities. The paintings are remnants of a dialogue with my surroundings.