Charmagne Vasquez (She/Her)
Charmagne Vasquez is an artist of contemporary paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Her current works often focus on interconnectedness and humankind’s role within earth’s dynamic biology. The artworks are made spontaneously with traditional and non-traditional media, as Charmagne builds up complex, colorful layers. Viewers experience organic landscapes and menageries. She expresses the tension of daily human occurrences, in parallel to the vast, interconnected web of life. Urban and feral. Civilization and hinterlands. She moves away from paradigms of personifying nature and magical thinking, and toward a curiosity-led perspective of better understanding flora and fauna. A work may contain references to the scientific world, as well as a rock and roll anthem. Having reverence of nature, of which we human animals are a part, is a very major theme. With the building up of each layer, she watchfully responds to emerging forms. Her process simultaneously radiates in all directions, with many creative projects cross-pollinating. Charmagne spends most days prolifically creating in her Phoenix, AZ studio.
Artist Statement:
Charmagne Vasquez is a visual artist of expressive, abstract and symbolic work. She currently explores human civilization’s relationships within nature, of which we are apart. In her paintings are rich, frenetic layers that sometimes enmesh re-purposed, found materials. It is integral in her process to foster cross-pollination of her art forms in painting, sculpture, drawing and poetry. Vasquez’s visions are found or evoked from experiences in nature’s wilderness, the wilderness within ourselves in daily life... and our grappling with being genetic animal family members from and within Mother Nature. Painted characters overlap twining branches. Mysterious creatures emerge into light and pull back into watery shadows. Today, Vasquez’s paintings often enmesh reclaimed materials and flora from surrounding environments. She experiments with ways of conveying structural decay, erosion and overgrowth within the powerful, unfolding forces of nature,“of which we are a part”. She works simultaneously on several series of paintings and media, stating she does her best work when able to uninhibitedly “spiral think” in many directions. She continues to further her methods by materials research, experimentation and study. Her artistic voice organically adapts as she follows her intuition to deep-dive areas of interests. Her current works express thoughts on ancestry, imperialism, biology, her daily life experiences and the human condition. She has recently begun developing raw sculptural works; these 3D forms mirror her past menagerie drawings. Vasquez often hand-draws on location; these become stand-alone works and inspire elements in other artworks. Inquisitiveness is her guide...she invokes viewers to also be curious and explore. Charmagne Vasquez was raised in a long family heritage of professional artists and musicians in her native city, Phoenix, Arizona. She graduated from Northern Arizona with degrees in Art and Elementary Education. Her works are internationally collected, represented, published and exhibited. She is also a poet of free verse. Notable recent inclusions of her artworks appeared in LUXE Interiors + Design Magazine, Mesa Contemporary Art Museum, and the Artist + Researcher Project with Phoenix Bioscience Core. Vasquez currently resides and works in Phoenix, Arizona. More at charmagnevasquez.com