Póbre, Marie
"I come from a mixed heritage; my father was Filipino, my mother Italian. As far as I can remember, my father created marvelous bas-relief wood carvings. Throughout my childhood I sat silently at his feet and watched him as he carved. Meanwhile, when I wasn’t watching my father, I drew incessantly. It was natural to me, an intrinsic expression of my energies. Perhaps that is why I’ve never thought of myself as a specifically Filipino artist or a woman artist. I am simply an artist.
When I was ten years old, I won a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Every Saturday I drew from a model in a large auditorium. After class, I’d wander through the museum for the rest of the day, studying the paintings.
I began painting in oils in the seventies, teaching myself technique by painting everything around me. Working in relative isolation, I later turned to the mirror, beginning a process that would focus me for almost a decade. I was fascinated by how a painting changed every time I worked on it. It changed as I changed. I was also grappling with the tension between my first expressionistic impetus, the force of my first spontaneous gestures, and my inner need for classical perfection.
I was also obsessed with finding out what was underneath the painting, and with giving visible form to the effects of time, cumulative experience, and memory.
This was the matrix of the piece New York/Chicago; my own face was the subject. I decided to paint myself at various times in two different locations, working on a section until I was interrupted. At that point, the section was finished. Because I had to stop at a time I could not consciously choose, the underlying gestures would be laid bare. Whatever interrupted me would change my experience, however slightly, so the next time I picked up the brush, I began a new section. New York/Chicago is 554 inches long and consists of thirty-nine self-portraits.
At the same time I painted New York/Chicago, I created abstract painting influenced by the forms of the body. I have always worked in multiple directions at once, each direction providing an excitement and freshness for the other.
As I continued to work, I turned to my own body, working in sequential series. Torsos became more and more abstract as the figures turned to lines, then back again to forms.
Later, I wanted my figures to move, and I wanted a vehicle into my unconscious. During a bout of bronchial pneumonia in 1986, when I couldn’t paint with oils, I turned to watercolor and pen and ink, thus releasing a flow of images from my unconscious that continues to this day. These are small, intimate pieces.
In the late eighties, I changed all of my large figurative paintings into abstracts, destroying most of the work I had done from 1985to then. In the early 90’s, I created large-scale charcoal drawings, allowing the figure to be subsumed into a geometric structure, retaining the gestural mark as events within the overall context. Now when I look at my earlier torso drawings, created over fifteen years ago, I can see the precursor of my geometric work.
Since 1994, these black drawings have turned to light and the watercolor images have translated into intimate-size oils."
Maria Póbre, Excerpt from Exhibition Request to AAAC, 1999