BIOGRAPHY

Self-taught Artist, Traveler, Enthusiast

Maria A. Chavez is a Cuban American artist born in Havana, Cuba.  She grew up in Long Island, New York after fleeing the Cuban communist regime.  She moved to Miami in 1975, and began her family and career as a local schoolteacher. She retired after 25 years to travel the world with her husband.

Maria’s initial experimentation in painting coincided with a sudden decrease in the clarity of her vision.  She was later diagnosed with chronic uveitis, a disease that causes a degenerative loss of eyesight. As the world around her began to take new forms and shapes, Maria endeavored to translate this new world onto her canvases.  Her initial works concentrate on the use of expressionistic cool palettes of acrylic on canvas, which correlate with the early stages of the degeneration. Maria began to use various fluid art techniques, allowing her to explore the therapeutic role of art.

As her vision degenerated, she began painting with high contrast-warm palettes that equate with the colors she would see later in the day associated with the “golden hour.” She later transitioned into darker palettes representing the dark shapes she would see at night.

Maria’s compositions have become a structured study of a new coloristic vocabulary, using different techniques to pour fluid colors onto her canvases with a variation of fluid arm and wrist movements. This resulted in a series of graceful, rich, surreal spaces, and mesmerizing patterns spread across the surface of her canvases. Together, Maria’s art forms a deeply satisfying unity achieved with harmony between parts of the high contrast palette and in the entirety of her canvases with hints of organic forms approaching in a nonrepresentational way. Explore our site to learn more about macfluidityart.