Marcela in her studio Like an intimate window into the primal elements at the heart of our world, surges of vibrant color and lushly textured shapes thrive on Marcela’s canvases with barely contained energy. Her abstract paintings fully embrace the mystery of nature, in which distinct particles come together to create beautiful, mesmerizing patterns. This richly organic aesthetic, a confluence of discrete parts and a visual sense of flow, also has a direct parallel in her creative process, a fervently held personal vision, which she transfers to the canvas.
Although her choice of materials has evolved, from oils to acrylics and collage, Marcela has always placed her faith in subjective inspiration. Marcela's true muse comes from her unconscious, not from outside objects or preconceived ideas. For Marcela, the work process is about letting what is inside come out, an internal exploration brought forth and presented as a form of personal communication from her to us. She is also deeply spiritual in her art in that she regards herself as a mere guide to these visions, as well as a navigator through the impressions of what she calls her personal journey in search of self.
For Marcela, a canvas is a place where the unknown can be manifest. This process leads to her vivid, stunning arrays of form and motion, like stained glass figures come alive, animating a world of sensations, which would otherwise lie dormant.

When looking at a work of art, it is not enough for it only to demand that one stands and contemplates as if to pick up the essence of a painting by osmosis. The work of a true artist grabs and transports the viewer to an alternate reality in which they are engulfed. The work of Patrick Girod is of this second kind. Working with a minimal palette—striking black forms on stark white ground are accented by daubs and areas of yellow, red, blue or green—his paintings are pared down to their utmost essence, rendering them expressive without extraneous detail. Girod’s primary painting technique is the dripping of oil paint onto the canvas. In some works these are left as statements of intent, but where he feels more work is needed Girod will overlay his images with pasted-on radiographies and more layers of oil paint.

Through building up the complexity, he adds depth and texture. However, the main intensity of emotion and movement remains with his initial marks that remain as the foundations of a creative manifestation.
Girod is able to express himself so purely due to his methods of preparation for the canvases. Before any marks are made, he takes an emotion, an event, a happening and works on it in his head, turning the thought over, exploring. Each is different; some periods of contemplation are fleeting, others take a long time, but when the time is right Girod moves immediately, marking the canvas rapidly in a state of mind somewhere between conscious and unconscious thought. He is opened to the process and can pour out his feelings uninhibited, directly onto the canvas.