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Rodica Miller


I was born and raised in Bucharest, Romania where I earned a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts ‘ Nicolae Grigorescu’. In 1996, I moved to the United States where I earned an Associates degree in Applied Science, specializing in Textile/ Surface Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, New York, in 2002. In spite of all the difficulties and complications, I managed to have my own website and began promoting my art through the Internet in 2003.

Painting is part of myself, a spectacular ordeal with so few satisfactions, regardless, nothing is more wonderful than the time spent in the studio, when you isolate yourself from the daily turmoil and, with an eagerness comparable to that of before a competition, you start working. It is a unique moment, when fatigue and loneliness- which crushed you like a fatality, devouring you without haste- disappears...at last the painting is ready and speaks...Around you, there is silence. Everything has its own meaning, and exhausted by the achieved flight, you feel like the chronicler of the time, who recorded the results of these experiences to leave them to those who will follow the same path...

My painting has been strongly influenced by the metaphysical surrealist painters Giorgio De Chirico “ the poet of emptiness” and Rene Magritte through his philosophical investigation and impossible settings. As for my painting technique, I feel comfortable with oil on canvas and the black backgrounds always represent Time and Outer Space for my soliloquies.
Welcome to my world!

“ Like the merging flow of joined dreams, the neo- surrealistic realms explored in the visual meditations of Rodica Alecsandra Petrescu angle into subterranean corners of the psyche. Frozen in states of becoming, they seem to taunt the meaning of actualization.”

A quote from; Irving G. Alexander- ‘ New Art International’, Book Art Press, Publishers, NY, 1999.


It happened many years ago, but I still remember the time when I read "How Wang-Fo Was Saved" by Marguerite Yourcenar. I was so captivated by the old  master, Wang-Fo- and his Disciple- that I remained quite pensive for a
couple of days.

The  descriptions  were  so  vivid taking me straight into the story, witnessing  all  their  struggles  and  happenings,  visualizing  all those beautiful paintings and colors.

My  admiration  for  that  master  and  his philosophy about life was flaming up my imagination from one paragraph to the next.

There  was  so  much  love  in the writer's words, so much beauty and perfection, so that the story will be in my heart and mind forever.
      
All of those wonderful hues and tones of color that the master used
to  discover-  even  from  the  ordinary,  or  odd  surroundings- were like
precious  painting  lessons  to me. But the way he chose to live his daily,
earthly  life, in a total improvisation, owning nothing and living nowhere,
depriving  himself  of  any  kind  of  comfort, were rising up the alarming
question "Why?"

But,  now,  after  experiencing all the trials and tribulations as an artist and woman, I have the answer and the meaning of the story.

Like  master  Wang-Fo,  I  had  to leave my properties, even my books
which  made  it harder. A couple of times, I had to change directions and to
make  incredible painful decisions for myself- and for others- and I had
to learn how to be happy with just what I have: my painting.

Everything  come  and  gone  so  unexpectedly, bringing joy or tears, terrible  storms  or  commotions, but my painting stayed with me as my only true and loyal friend...

It  has never deceived or betrayed me. On the contrary, it has always offered me challenges with myself or with others.

Like  master  Wang-Fo,  I  found  myself  inspired in ordinary common places, and I painted and wrote in unusual surroundings, whenever my spirit was capable to receive the Enlighten.

Like  a  little  bird  that  is  content with just a drop of water, I 'flew' further and further following my bliss and my dreams....

Nevertheless,  God  has  something  to  do  with  all these, and I am grateful  for  His  magnificent  gift, which is Painting, and for this fast paced adventurous journey, which is my life...

Artist Confession
 
    I wish I could paint with the alertness of thought:
The hot wave of our meeting from that unique spring,
The dream world of childhood carried on cloud wings,
The song of  the sea,
The dangerous charm of remote places,
The Grail,
The cold and pure air of the flight over blue mountains,
The venom of lies and the poison of the betrayals,
The pearled tones of the soul in the morning of life and the sadness of its sunset,
The labyrinth of Uncertainty,
The shape of Ideal,
The unseen attraction force of Evil,
The tearing desert of waiting,
The color of suffering,
The fragile-delicate face of Hope,
The terrible moment of Renunciation.
 
Rodica Alecsandra  

 All this follows the subtle trajectories and accomplished decantations, of shape and color from the interior labyrinth. Rodica Petrescu prefers the realms- much more fascinating- of dream anatomy, where all human emotions gain maximum intensity and the sublimated expression of the! meaning of life and man’s predestination. Through this effort of visualizing the ineffable, it becomes a feat of extreme individualization of the creator’s intention. But, it also becomes an answer to the eternally questioning and probing natural human spirit. That is the reason for which the artist resorts to a series of means, belonging to the endless surrealist arsenal (via the Magritte route), without obeying the aesthetic codes of this current.
 
Apparently, the artist focuses upon the gothic mythology the same that fascinated the generations of the last great romantics as they bathed in the vice of Wagnerian sonorities. Rodica’s “Graal” claims itself as an insatiable hunger for purity and superlativity- but not through intangible projections- birthing of ceaseless sagas of heroes, that alternate between mystical devotion pushed until ultimate sacrifice and painful wandering.
The painter retains from this marvelous universe the visual suggestions, which in the a! rtist’s vision assume a sum of primordial elements. A world of the mineral, in incandescent, metamorphic transpositions, evokes a time of origins and essences.

Rodica’s painting is above all, the utter obliteration of certain prejudices. Despite the cultural preciousness that it rightfully assigns to itself, this painting captures a certain fraction of the cold and offensive sensibility of today’s world, not below the avidity of the puritan nostalgia of the first Christians, or the Crusaders. New religions find foundations in the rediscovery of the primordial creeds. The initiating itinerary towards acquiring the Grail becomes the poem that lights the horizon spanned by human hopes from the inside. The conquering fires of a ˜ Parsiphal” or a ˜ Mystical Kaballah” of ˜ The Eaters of Illusions” embarked on an ˜ Underground Journey” are very much alive in each one of us. Such fascinating titles populate the design of the exhibition at Goethe Institute, where Rodica Petrescu performs to convert plastically the realms of the unseen, where only essences and dreams and ideal and embodiment are lasting. Here she is today succeeding   to convince us that there still exists an eminently objective painting based on abstract contents.

A truly delightful exhibition of ingenuity and tension in plastic thought, attained solely through the spiritual refinement of discourse and through the chromatic density that is displayed in the contents of these pictorial essays. Rodica Petrescu’s painting is much more than this; it is a form of the aspiration to purity.
 
Corneliu Antim, The Shape of the Ideal, “Luceafarul“, January 27, 1993
 
Born and raised in Bucharest, Romania, Rodica has moved to the United States and settled down upstate New York since 1996.
She has a Bachelor in Fine Arts degree in Painting from The Academy of Fine Arts ‘Nicolae Grigorescu’, Bucharest, Romania, and an Associate in Applied Science degree in Textile/Surface Design from State University of New York State , Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, NY.