Tamara Wyndham, submitted artwork
Tamara Wyndham
Painting, Performance
New York City
Tamara Wyndham has been making art all her life, encouraged by her mother, an artist. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, she studied traditional drawing and painting at California State University, Long Beach, and more experimental drawing, book works, and performance at the University of California at Irvine. Ms. Wyndham has been awarded artist residencies at the Henry Street Settlement, the Kate Millett Art Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Maříž Ceramic Workshop in the Czech Republic, Fundación Valparaíso in Mojácar, Spain, and an artist’s fellowship from Earthwatch to work in Orce, Spain. She received a grant from the Jenni Crain Foundation. She has exhibited at the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, the International Fusionism Museum, Gallery GAIA, Artfront Galleries, Grace Exhibition Space, and has performed at ChaShaMa and Art in Odd Places.
Works
Tamara Wyndham, submitted artwork
Contact prints of the body have a tradition in sacred arts, often functioning as evidence of the physical existence of divine or holy persons. We know the Shroud of Turin, the footprints of Buddha and Mohammed, prehistoric cave hand prints, and the thumb print signature. The message of the hand print, foot print, or body print is “I was here”. There is also a sense of a straightforward image not interpreted by the artist’s imagination: a direct impression. The process of making the work involves one or more actual contact body prints. I put paint on the model’s body, and press it onto a surface. Then I paint color around it and in layers over it, working further with brushes, my fingers, airbrush, and splattered painting techniques. The layers, adding both physical and metaphorical substance, enhance the original print, as well as building up a glow, so that the aura becomes luminous. The anatomical and disintegrating nature of body prints brings associations of sex and of death. The body is a site of life and death struggle. It is through the body that we experience pain and ecstasy, immanence and transcendence. I draw upon those spiritual traditions that honor living in the body. My art evokes complex and intense emotions both joyful and troubling, and intensely spiritual. I seek to invoke in the viewer a sense of awe for our existence. I work so that my paintings would bring a shift in consciousness – a spiritual experience – in the viewer.
