AN ARTIST FINDS INSPIRATION IN VIBRANT COLOR — AND IN THE GLITTERING NIGHT SKY

by Edward M. Gómez

Every artist has a story to tell. Sometimes artists’ personal stories are reflected vividly in their work if or when their lives become their subject matter. In other cases, the evolution of their work — how they handle their materials and develop technically, or how they think about and present their themes — can become a focal point of their art.

The artist Julia Sisi, who was born in Argentina in 1957, and now lives and works in a small town in France, kindly allowed us to reproduce her colorful drawing “Winter,” from 2020 (below), now that we have the current season’s chilly charms on our mind. As e-mail messages went back and forth, we caught up with her and, from one pandemic-isolation chamber to another, conducted an interview that shed some light on how drawings like “Winter” have become representative of the work Sisi has been producing in recent years.

Some excerpts from our long-distance chat, which took place over mugs of winter grog: