Paula Arciniega

Paula's current collection - Pictures at an Exhibition Reimagined - is a graphic interpretation of the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky's 1874 musical composition “Pictures at an Exhibition Reimagined.”

Paula’s work was featured as part of the TSO Art & Music Series in 2015. She has installed “art-scapes” with Hamilton Philharmonic (Maestro James Sommerville) at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. She has collaborated with Toronto's Group of 27 (Music Director Eric Paetkau) as well as with Grammy nominated New York Piano Quartet (New York Chamber Music Festival).

Paula is a member of Toronto’s distinguished Heliconian Club. She has sold works to clients across 4 continent. Paula lives and works out of her Toronto studio with her husband and 3 children. Full Artist Bio >

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The Rite of Spring is a series of graphic interpretations of the infamous composition by Igor Stravinsky entitled “Le Sacre du Printemps” written in 1913 for the Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company. Stravinsky's composition and Paula's collection of paintings are a dovetailing of raw, primitive emotion and nature’s exacting cycle of re-birth.

The charge of honouring my inner world is a vocation of the selfless disclosure of my-human-soul – a soul that bears the marks of suffering, the widened apertures of exaltation, and the childlike delight in how ‘mystery’ is the mother of all poetry.

– Paula Arciniega

Paula envisions a world entrenched in colour, depth and never-ending change. Her unique style lies in how she creates colour harmonies that breathe life into the subject matter. Paula Arciniega’s creative career started with music, earning her Masters at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music – so it’s only natural that music has become her muse as she’s fallen in love with painting. For the past 16 years Paula has been weaving together these two artistic paths – one as a vocalist and the other as a painter.

As a painter, Paula has moved through a number of projects: The Mahler Project, Postpartum, The Rite of Spring and now Pictures at an Exhibition Reimagined.

The Rite of Spring is a series of graphic interpretations of the infamous composition by Igor Stravinsky entitled “Le Sacre du Printemps” written in 1913 for the Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company. Stravinsky’s score for the ballet consists of 2 parts. Part 1, "L’Adoration de la Terre", consists of 7 short movements. And Part 2, "Le Sacrifice", consists of 6 movements. Stravinsky's composition and Paula's collection of paintings are a dovetailing of raw, primitive emotion and nature’s exacting cycle of re-birth.

The Mahler Project (2008) is a journey into the mind and music of Gustav Mahler. In this series of abstract paintings inspired by Mahler’s symphonies and Lieder, Paula's compositional instincts are on full display: making deft choices regarding how the subject matter will be heightened with light, what will be cast into mysterious swirls of color and shadow, what color harmonies will support these visionary dramas.

The Postpartum collection is a reflection of Paula's journey through postpartum depression. Several of the paintings from this collection were inspired by the great late romantic composer Richard Strauss, His music provided an endless pallet of tone, color and texture for Paula's artistic interpretation.

Throughout much of Paula's work, the female body is featured: sometimes in quintessentially modern ways (simplified shoulder lines, breasts distilled as bold brush strokes, disembodied faces that strongly suggest narrative); sometimes in a more representative way (textured, fully embodied women). Paula clearly sees The Female experience as a story of complex truth: true feminine power is never arrived at easily. There is an inevitable potency to the female body's curves and its reproductive power, to be sure. But, in seeking a modern honesty, Paula wants women to define their own truths and seek success on their own terms.

Paula repeatedly and adoringly comes back to Landscapes – a welcome shift of headspace from her more expressive, abstract works. The act of faithfully, photo-realistically rendering an image with paint, even when the artist takes certain liberties, is a way of seeing unlike abstract work, with its focus on light and depth-of-field and its more visceral connection to land, water and sky.

Her recent Rapid Fire paintings (completed in a matter of hours) are also a hit, and make it possible for those on a tight budget to have their own Arciniega original.

collaboration

Paula’s musical background, combined with her interpretation of sound and colour have given rise to a number of collaborations with world-class organizations and people. Paula’s work was featured on TSO Art & Music Series programmes in 2015.

Paula has installed “art-scapes” with several musical organizations such the Hamilton Philharmonic (Maestro James Sommerville) at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and in Toronto with Group of 27 (Music Director Eric Paetkau). Paula has also collaborated artistically with musical colleagues such as Achilles Liarmakopoulos (Tbn Canadian Brass) and Grammy nominated New York Piano Quartet (New York Chamber Music Festival). Paula became a member of Toronto’s distinguished Heliconian Club in 2014.

Paula lives and works out of her studio in Toronto with her husband and 3 children. Paula has sold works to clients across 4 continents.