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VALDA BATRAKS
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"I grew up in the countryside, where one could be with nature daily,” Valda Batraks says. “This helped me to develop an appreciation for the uniqueness of form and texture in space.” As a young girl, she traveled around her native Latvia with her father, Bronislavs Pavlovskis an art teacher, helping him with his summer work restoring church altar paintings. His guidance and encouragement fed a love of drawing that Batraks feels to this day, a love that is evident in her art, for only one who loves her craft could possibly invest each piece with the amount of detail that hers display. It isn’t enough to say that one finds in her pencil works subtle gradations of darkness, as one can almost literally detect the application of individual particles of lead comporting with the grain of her surface of choice. Her etchings and lithographs evince the same care, with every stroke and line carefully considered and actualized.
Batrak’s themes are ruminative—consciousness, memories, dreams, death, and transformation. Her figures often seem lost behind a veil of thought, a quality Batrak imparts by somehow “soft lensing” her image.
The emancipation of Latvia from the former Soviet Union was a landmark in Batrak’s career, allowing her to become internationally recognized and featured everywhere from France and Sweden to Japan and Taiwan. One of her pieces “Towers” was selected for a Latvian postage stamp in 2003.
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