Today we’d like to introduce you to Debra Fernandez

Hi Debra, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.

Long life, long story: I was in my early twenties and living on the island of Corfou in Greece and hanging out with an Italian filmmaker, his mother and his sister. One night we were out at a restaurant/bar on the water and the music started playing. I started dancing and improvising up a storm. I must have had some good moves because the filmmaker’s mother who was an elegant and educated woman from Brussels told me I should become a dancer. At this point, I was on a break from college and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. After a dramatic summer which I won’t go into (ha ha) I returned home to Tampa, Florida. Her words echoed in my head and I enrolled at the University of South Florida and decided to take my first dance class. It changed the course of my life! My path became clear to me even if it seemed like a crazy goal given that I started training so late. I pursued it with passion and followed my heart. Fast forward 50 years: I retired as a full professor and Chair of the dance department at Skidmore College and was blessed to have spent my work years doing the things I love; dancing, choreographing and educating young students. Once I retired and took a break for a few years I began to feel the creative itch again and I turned my love of form, pattern and color to the visual arts creating collages and works on paper. I have been at this now for about a year and three months and the work has progressed in ways I am very satisfied with. It is inextricably linked to my choreography and my love of the physical form and composition and fulfills that part of me.

I began putting them out into the world by posting them on Facebook and Instagram as a way of challenging myself to be bold about showing them to people. Much to my delight and surprise people wanted to buy them. I’m currently working on a website and starting to learn about the world of galleries and exhibitions. I’m not exactly certain what the next phase will bring about, but I remain perfectly content with simply making them and sharing them with people I know and others they refer me to. I trust the process will unfold as it is meant to. This has been a guiding principle in my life.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?

I wonder if our obstacles and challenges all come from within us. I remember when students in my composition class would say something like, “my problem is that…” And, I would answer that the problem is the THING itself, the very thing you need to work on and investigate. It isn’t some outside force that swoops down on us to get in our way. I’m not naively saying that there aren’t real obstacles and challenges in life, but I always felt that whatever seemed to be blocking me or getting in my way was a teacher of sorts and helped me grow and develop.
At this current stage of my life I would say my challenge is that I’m not in my forties with plenty of fire in the belly. I’m 72 years old and love staying home and leading a quiet life. So, will I be able to move this creative gift to the next level? Do I even want to and if I do, will I have the energy or drive to do it?
These are the honest questions I am asking myself and I trust (back to that again) that I will find the answers if I just keep working and letting that same passion and curiosity that fueled my dance life lead the way again.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?

Here is my artist statement which will give you an insight into my process and the things that mean something to me as well as the things that don’t:

My collage work grows directly out of my longtime experience as a dancer and choreographer. The collage process—cutting, pasting, moving shapes and images in relation to the frame of the page and in relation to one another—involves the same sense of play, the same ways of dealing with positive and negative space, as creating a dance. My own somatic instincts, including energy, connection, and flow, guide my art-making; I impose no preplanned design and allow each collage to emerge in its own time. The resulting images evoke, in a Rorschach-like way, different interpretations, meanings, and emotional responses. I
attempt to tell not just specific stories, but the stories that may emerge for each individual viewer. My hope is that the work will have a wide and primal appeal communicating the vitality that impels me to make it and the mystery from which it springs.

My Process
The NO/YES Manifesto, adapted from Yvonne Ranier’s 1964 No Manifesto

NO to perfection/YES to randomness, accidents, and surprise
NO to exact symmetry/YES to “Alignment is everywhere” (Deborah Hay)
NO to the tyranny of planning/YES to spontaneous design
NO to forcing/YES to emergence
NO to wastefulness/YES to scraps and leftovers
NO to impatience/YES to instant revelations
NO to hiding flaws/YES to rough edges and jagged cuts
NO to precision/YES to tearing, ripping, cutting and pasting
NO to exact repetition/YES to endless replication
NO to the clock/YES to five days or five minutes
NO to the finest of the fine/YES to Wabi Sabi

If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?

The most important thing to me at this stage is to share my work with others. My pleasure and satisfaction come from knowing that one of my pieces has moved someone or spoken to them in some way. Knowing I am hanging in their home and enriching their surroundings feels very special to me.

You are only seeing 8 works here but I have created roughly 350 pieces over the past 15 months. The works are usually created in a series of about 4 to 8 pieces that are meant to be grouped together because of the type of paper or color scheme being used at the time. All the works, however, have a common element of movement with an emphasis on positive and negative space.

Pricing:

• 22″x28″ $500
• 12″x18″ $400
• 11″x14″ $300

Contact Info:

• Facebook: Debra Fernandez
• Other: Instagram: debrajfernandez or email me at [email protected] for information about purchasing