Florin Ion Firimita's Page

1. When did you first begin making art? (tell us a little about your background in art)

I was six years old when my father, an amateur photographer, entrusted me with mixing chemicals (what was he thinking?!) in his improvised photo lab in Bucharest. It was my first encounter with the magic of image-making. I spent a lot of quiet hours helping my father develop his films and printing photographs. To me that was far more interesting than going outside and playing with children my age. Inventing realities became to me more fruitful. Reading helped a lot. After a while, I started painting in watercolors. I drew and painted scenes from western movies, which were still shown on Romanian TV at the time. I also started keeping a journal and writing fiction at the age of 12 (still going on strongly today). My parents were very supportive of me, even if they were aware that becoming an artist was quite a bleak perspective for anyone living in communist Romania. They enrolled me in drawing and painting classes. They sent me to art camps, paid for private lessons. Later, I was lucky enough to get accepted into an elite art high-school in Bucharest.


2. What drew you to the type of art you are making now?

For many years I was a “traditional” easel painter, but after I came to the US in 1990, I realized that I needed new forms of expression, the way I needed a new identity. I was overwhelmed with the variety of art forms, styles, and approaches to art. Living in a police state for 25 years froze me into an intellectual and emotional vacuum. Art history ended for us with Picasso, music with the Beatles. Being an artist in Eastern Europe in the 1980’s was like visiting Cuba now, and seeing all those 1950’s Chevys still on the road, as if time stood still. We were denied access to the future.

Coming to the US was for me the greatest opportunity of my life. Those of us who come from oppressive cultures long to shed our previous skins, to “reinvent” ourselves. On the other hand, it is very hard to be original or to find a path in your art. You can’t skip the living part, the “real” life. I keep telling my students that in order to make art that means something you need a sense of humility. Everything has been done before. When you are in college, you think that being “original” is the goal, but you realize that originality doesn’t spring from artifice, but from experience ready to take risks. Every time you fall in love with an idea/ concept/ style, you deny yourself the excitement of opening a new door. When I came to the United States, I was still painting traditionally, in a realistic style, mostly landscapes, portraits, still lifes. They sold pretty quickly, which created a sense of comfort. If people liked them, I thought, they must be good. Sometimes in 1995 I visited a prestigious art dealer in New York City, who after a five hour conversation, told me that I was a bright young man, but that my art was purely wallpaper! I was so hurt at the time, maybe because deep down, I knew that he was right. I remember him saying, “If you are not in your artwork, then, what kind of artist are you?” I stopped painting for a few months. I was not in my artwork, I know that now. I went back to college, started working, learning, reading, visiting museums, hundreds of galleries, as if I had just landed on a new planet. This was not too hard, because I am extremely curious about the world. Elements of collage started appearing in my work, mainly family photos. I started thinking about how to translate my experiences from Romania (which were pretty dramatic: my parents died during my last two years of high-school; in 1990, I survived the violent uprising against the Romanian dictatorship, etc.) into visual language. This happened sometimes in 2000. Then, I completely broke off with what I was doing before, puzzling most of the admirers of my bucolic landscapes and still lifes. Today, I am using a lot of materials, fabric, metal, paint, pencil, collage, and my subject matter is totally different. I am also working on a smaller, more intimate format. I sometimes think of my pieces as pages from a contemporary illuminated manuscript. It is a form of expression at which I arrived after years of soul-searching and technical experimentation.

3. What does your art mean to you? What is the symbolism?

Art feels like looking in a mirror to me. For better or for worse, it is there, and it is not going away. Its “meaning” is something that I constantly question. I want to be in my art. I hope that sometimes it happens. I am interested in content-based art, art that is about something and that has meaning. I would also like to see beauty restored in the artistic dialogue. Beautiful in the visual arts has become a suspicious term. Although it has its place, political art does not interest me. I don’t want to get my news from my aesthetic experiences. There are several aspects that come to define you as an adult and as an artist. It is a matter of how honest do you want to be with yourself and with your audience. I guess that being an artist is largely about paying attention.

In terms of symbolism, there is a lot to talk about. The woman as a symbol shows up quite often in my work. Women have been a great source of inspiration and strength in my life. I think women are in a sense, much more evolved beings than us, men, better listeners (in the sense of in a better fine-tuning relationship with the universe), more open, more able to receive and give. I was very closed to my mother. She died of cancer during my last year of high-school, a year after my father died from a heart-attack. I spent my senior year of high school taking my mother back-and-forth to the municipal hospital in Bucharest, trying to find food for her (we had a shortage of just about everything), giving her morphine, helping her how to walk after the grueling chemo sessions. Then, two years ago, my best friend Diane died of lung cancer, and it felt like a deja-vu, twenty years after my mother’s death. The shaved head, the pain, the machines trying to “fix” us, the refusal of the spirit to give up. I guess this is where the relationship between our frail physicality (the body) and healing, pain and regeneration comes into my work. I have been incorporating mechanical parts, gears, metal pieces (like in my “prosthetic angels”), and made references both to technology and biology. I am intrigued by quantum physics, the parallel universe theory. I am exploring the conflict between the physical world and the mind (like in my “dream cages”), the relationship between freedom and confinement, the past and the present, sensuality and decay, the sacred and the profane. The dress mannequin appeared several years ago, after director Brian Kamerzel, who was filming The Art of Leaving, a documentary about my work, bought one to use it as a prop. I use today as a symbol for my mother, who was an educated woman who studied fashion design, was ready to open her own business in France, but had the misfortune to come from an aristocratic family. When the Russians took over the country in 1945, she was forced to work as a seamstress for the rest of her life. The dress mannequin is reminiscent of a bird cage or a circular prison cell. I always attach the image of a body to its upper part. It creates a disabled figure that is always trying to break out of its confinement.


4. How do you find inspiration?

I find inspiration just about everywhere. Mixed media is such an appropriate way of representing and interpreting what is around me precisely because we live in such a fragmented world. The world is not devoid of magic. We are just too busy to pay attention to it. Inspiration is tuning into that magic. The moment you look at something as if you are seeing it for the first time, everything is possible. And this is nothing new for artists. Duchamp, Monet, Bearden, Michelangelo, Rauschenberg, Van Gogh, Picasso, all great artists looked at the world as if they were just born. The challenge is how to give meaning to all that. To me, it is like living in a parallel universe, one of the immediate reality (waking up, having breakfast, paying bills) and the other of making connections that are not apparent to the “normal” eye. It is like a spiritual x-ray machine. Sometimes, I start a work just by hearing the title of a song or a poem. I freeze certain frames while watching a film, just to write down some notes about a color scheme. I constantly look at art. I visit museums, galleries. I travel. The best inspiration comes from working itself. Yesterday I was cleaning my studio, which usually becomes like a battle ground, and was looking at the large pile of scraps op paper, fabric, photographs, paint tubes, pencils and brushes, and started smiling. How does anything take shape out of that? Somehow, sometimes, it happens, and I when it does, I am grateful for the magic.


5. What types of materials do you use?

Acrylic and watercolor paint, ink, charcoal, conté crayons, fabric, found objects, markers, etc. In the past several years I have been using mainly masonite as a support.


6. How do you feel people react to your pieces?

I think that at this point, I have arrived at the luxury of making the art that I want to make without trying to please anybody but myself. I don’t work with an audience in mind, but I am aware of its existence. Art has to be shown. Sometimes, I get a phone call from a collector asking me if I could paint a landscape. Of course, technically I could, but why would I? I am not the same person who was painting landscapes 15 years ago, holding on to my past. It was a leap of faith to move on to this kind of spiritual surrealism, but there is so much more room to play, to explore, and to express myself. I am having a lot of fun with it.

I like when the viewers identify themselves with my work. What I think that work is about is only a small percentage of what the work might be about. A good, lasting work of art is constantly open and fresh, and the viewers will always complete it. The viewer always brings the work to completion, yet, the work keeps opening itself. We are lucky if that happens to the art we make, even once in a lifetime.

My work sells well, yet I am constantly amazed when people want it enough to buy it. You could probably live quite content among framed artwork posters. I love the fact that there is need out there for all kinds of original visual forms of expression. We love things that leave traces of our hands and spirit embedded within them. Last night I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and it was packed. I kept thinking that people need something more in their lives than their houses and cars and resumes. You could have the coolest resume in the world, and miss feeling alive in front of a Rodin sculpture. That would be terribly sad, because it would mean that you are missing a fundamental part about being alive: without art, you are missing your humanity.


6. Where is your work being shown currently?

Every year I participate in many exhibits. (In 2007 I showed in 20 solo and group show in the US.) I have been fortunate to be represented by a few outstanding galleries: in Connecticut, Central Gallery in Old Saybrook, and White Space Gallery in New Haven (where I had the privilege of having my work displayed next to Picasso, Chagall, and Salvador Dali); Gallery 137 in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts. And of course, there is plenty of works to see on my website: www.florinfirimita.com


7. What do you feel is your biggest accomplishment?

The luxury of being myself without compromising my soul.


8. Please tell me anything else you think I or the readers would want to know.

Look inside my work.