Week 6 – Artists Conversation – Bianca & Alice Andreini

Alice Andreini painted flowers because she believes symbolism hides behind flowers. The flowers she painted were crocuses and chrysanthemums that were inspired by the gardens her mother created and of some soldiers. Her mother taught her with gardening there’s a focus of space, time, money, and security. With that, she was able to take that and relate to it in her artwork. She believes that her art is similar to soldiers, they are either protective or destructive. The medium she used was oil on canvas. She also answered the question for the day. What I expected to her answer about the primary colors took me by surprise to see how much more open she is. She felt that red is tied to excitement, anger, and romance. For her yellow is a very dynamic, vibrant but yet a neutral color. She feels it’s a friendly color. Lastly, blue for her represents more of a water element but like yellow, blue is also a friendly color.

I also had a quick conversation with one of the artists, Bianca who did “Mezclado”. “Mezclado” is a collaboration between five other Latina artists. They used various mediums. There main goal was to show how they felt their Latino heritage is being is being stereotyped. Bianca said that their artwork was a 2 part show. The first part was inspired by the game Loteria, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, it’s like bingo but instead of numbers and letters they are images. In Loteria they had different images and made them into how those images are being stereotyped today.  Bianca’s contribution to the second part of the show were the huaraches. Huaraches are traditional sandals worn by the Hispanic culture dating back to pre-Mexico and pre-Colombia. Huaraches were durable and could be worn in any type of weather. In this piece “Estos No Son Toms” or “These Are Not Toms” explains how these hard working Hispanics hand made the huaraches out of leather and sold around $20 and now Toms created a similar style to these huaraches called “Cognac Leather Huaraches” also hand made in Mexico, but is sold for $129-$149.