Marie Kazalia - Marie Kazalia's paintings
Mischtechnik, Malerei
Artist Statement for Marie Kazalia:
The images presented here represent the emergence of color and language influences from my 4 expatriate years in Japan, India and China.
An American, born in Toledo, Ohio, with a Bachelor of Fines Arts degree from the California College of Arts & Crafts in the San Francisco bay area, I studied Japanese at a private language school in Tokyo where I practiced speaking, reading and writing Japanese kanji, hiragana and katakana characters. The hiragana and katakana are the more modern simplified characters most often used on the many large neon signs in the urban centers of Tokyo. The oversized dominant forms of these Asian language characters, as identification or to advertise a product, have held their strong impact on me in conjunction with the Chinese calligraphic characters I enlarge and abstract by combining, reversing, overlapping, filling and distorting.
From Japan I traveled to India, and after one full year there I moved to Hong Kong and enrolled in a Mandarin language course at the Chinese University-- studying conversation, reading, and writing Chinese characters. Being able to read hundreds of the most common Chinese characters made it easier for me when I traveled by train up through mainland China (the PRC=Peoples Republic of China) to Beijing, then down to Shanghai, and back to Hong Kong, and during my one month stay in Taipei, Taiwan (the ROC=Republic of China). I was able to read street signs, shop signs and advertisements in Chinese throughout the PRC & ROC.
Now, as returned expatriate, the color influences of Japan, India and China and the forms of the written characters of the languages of these countries, as well as the other Asian countries I visited for shorter periods--Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Korea--reemerge in their new abstracted and combined forms, with overlays of color to obtain the translucency, transparency, or opacity of the drawn stroke visualized before I begin.