Oil Painter and Arts Educator www.tiffanygrahamart.com From my earliest portraits, still-lives, and imagined compositions, I nurtured a romantic sensibility bred from a family rich in Spanish culture- the brooding and laconic spirit of Flamenco music and dance. My work has been referred to as “Romantic Surrealism” although I feel that my paintings seek the ancient truth of the child’s dream. “And your childhood, love, your childhood. The train and the woman who fills the sky. Not you, not me, not the air, not the leaves. Yes, your childhood: now a fable of fountains.” – Federico Garcia Lorca I owe my intimacy with light and water, mountain and sky to yearly ventures to the wilderness of Alaska and the rural Indian village where my grandmother lived and painted in Central Mexico. To me, every glimpse at nature is a kind of dreamscape. The element of landscape in my work is always rendered from memory- rather than paint what’s in front of me, I prefer to surround myself with that thing, go away from it and wait for it to resurface in my imagination. My keen interest in literature and poetry also figure into my work in much the same way, through transposition. “She has left the world of facts to enter that of illusions, and sometimes I think that an illusion is perhaps the shape that the innermost secret realities take in the minds of common folk.”- Marguerite Yourcenar