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Artist Statement for Marika Choma
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I have been an artist all my life and have explored various forms of creative expression since childhood. I have expressed myself as a ballet dancer, singer, actress, advertising illustrator, advertising copywriter, art director, and interior architect and designer. Art has been my purest and truest companion throughout and it appears that all other endeavors have served to supplement and enhance its natural evolution and refinement.
I was born in 1952 in the far southern portion of Germany, in a tiny village, about a thirty-minute car drive from the Swiss, German, and Austrian high Alps. My mother was German and my father Ukrainian. I was raised in New York and after 17 years, spent another 18 years in Los Angeles and Malibu, punctuated by time spent in Montreal and Vancouver, Canada. I entered my first city-wide art competition as a child in New York at the age of nine and won a first prize in the medium of watercolor. By the age of eleven, I was regularly producing works in oil, and continued to enter and win competitions. By the time I graduated from high school, I had mastered a proficiency in a wide range of mediums and had spent my last year apprenticing with my art teacher and enduring friend, a working artist living in Soho by the name of Nina Klymowska.
After a two-year stint in the early 1970s working as a freelance advertising illustrator, I experienced a type of awakening and consequently left the profession. I had realized that although I had achieved a certain technical status, I was being taken further and further away from what I felt to be actually art. And so I went about very deliberately erasing all the tapes in my mind of what I had been taught that art was and I started from scratch. How? Simply by innocent doodling and caring not a whit about what appeared on the paper. In a relatively short time, a totally different visual language had presented itself and I felt that I had gotten where I had once wished that I could be. The first breakthrough piece of art occurred in 1974, in about 15 minutes of time. This work is still in my possession.
I approached each work with no plan or preconception whatsoever. Perhaps a remnant of a feeling, an energy, a part of a remembrance ... the subconscious? I started with a blank paper or canvas, then a simple form, perhaps a circle, and went from there. Everything else followed quite naturally once I had gotten myself out of the way. All my work is done in this manner. The work simply appears and reveals itself. There is no preconceived image. My intention was to leave the exterior world of object observation and rendering and enter the world beneath it: a world of pure energy, essence, archetype, symbology, and myth – the universal, unseen world that holds us all and everything in its expanse. And I’ve sought the beauty and the joy in it. This has been my objective and interest from 1974 until the present.
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