Marika Choma

European born and New York City raised... I have been an artist all my life and have explored various forms of creative expression since childhood. I have expressed myself as a ballet dancer (American Ballet Theatre), singer, actress, advertising illustrator, advertising copywriter, art director, and interior architect and designer. After a two-year stint in the early 1970s working as a freelance advertising illustrator, I experienced a type of awakening, followed by a pure re-commitment to my work. I realized that although I had achieved a certain technical status, I was being taken further and further away from the creative process. And so I went about very deliberately erasing all the tapes in my mind of what I had been taught that art was and I started from scratch. How? Simply by innocent doodling and caring not a whit about what appeared on the paper. In a relatively short time, a totally different visual language revealed itself and I felt that I had gotten where I had once wished that I could be. The first breakthrough piece of art occurred in 1974, in about 15 minutes of time. This work is still in my possession.

At some point, when the work and its inherent visual language became 'realized'... I stopped dating my works. This is because I had arrived at a point where the work ceased to follow any genealogical line and dates did not serve in any way, as reference points for any kind of evolution or development.

I approach each work with no plan or preconception whatsoever… Perhaps a remnant of a feeling, an energy, a part of a remembrance ... the subconscious? I begin with a blank paper or canvas, then a simple form, perhaps a circle, and go from there. Everything else follows quite naturally once I manage to get myself out of the way! All my work is done in this manner. The work simply appears and reveals itself. There is no preconceived image. My intention is to leave the exterior world of object-observation and rendering and enter the world beyond it: a world of pure energy, essence, archetype, symbology and myth… the universal, unseen world that holds us all and everything in its expanse. And I’ve sought the beauty and the joy in it. This has been my objective and focus from 1974 until the present.

—Marika Choma

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