Emilia Sirrs: The Power of Art

What is it about an artist that will make us relate to their work? Is it a feeling of understanding? Maybe a feeling of déjà-vu?   Maybe we are even able to imagine the artist fighting with their feelings in order to create a work of art. Shockingly, more often than not, these abstract- or feeling centered- works will seem childish or even easy to duplicate for non-professional art observers. They are not. Art works hide many things within them, stories and inspirations, cries and laughters, sadness and happiness.

What role does art really fulfill? Are they there only to represent an idea? To communicate a message, wether political or social? Art can also be a way to express themselves, mend injuries and find a way to repair damages in one’s personal life. They can also transmit one’s  extreme happiness. They say Winston Churchill himself painted in order to relax. Usually, when I write an article about an artist, I try to gather as much information about them as possible, knowing that someone’s life, what happened to them, who they met, really influences their work. Merlau-Ponty, the French philosopher said that there wasn’t seeing without vision. This means that according to one’s life, what you see, and consequently what you think and do are a directly influenced by those events. 

Emilia Sirrs is a Mexican painter born in Cincinnati Ohio. She arrived to Mexico at six years old. A few years later, she started taking drawing and painting classes and eventually became a student of renowned painters Pascual Santillán , Francisco Salas y José Lazcarro. Overall, she has had more than 40 collective, and individual expositions nationwide and even internationally such as in Belgium and the United States.

Taking into account that I don’t know much more about Emilia Sirrs that can tell me these few facts, I do know though that her life influenced how she saw the world and how her painting was to develop through time.  Upon seeing Sirrs work for the first time, I was rejoiced by seeing these elements from daily life incorporate her work. I saw it as an explosion of creativity, leaving the classic and going for new mediums. Expanding from the canvas like a wave engulfing her surroundings.  Yet, I decided that criticizing a work of art as lightly as that, based solely on my first impression with no more thorough exploration was somewhat amateur. I then discovered how powerful a weapon art can be for some artists. How it is not to be taken lightly.  Art becomes one with the artists just as language is to a writer, without it they have no more tools to express themselves and to communicate their feelings and thoughts. Moreover, this part of them that art becomes will therefore evolve with the artist himself even if he doesn’t know. It will reflect their moods and states. The work of art might become independent from the artist, but the artist won’t become independent from it. As Edvar Munch, the famous Norwegian painter said: “Colours gain a life of their own once they have been applied on the canvas”. Though, the artist’s life does not end once the canvas has been laid by pigments, it goes on.

Emilia Sirrs proved to me this power of art. Having suffered a loss in her life, her painting, just as her, have changed.  One evolved with the other. Before the event, her art was vibrant, independent, as Munch would say.  One of her works, “La Pasion” has evidently a real strength to it. You could look at it for hours on end, just as you would a Rothko.  A passion was transmitted from the painter’s hand on to the canvas. Sincerely, it’s one of those works where the words are not enough to describe it. An image is mandatory to the comprehension.  Below is the image of this painting. 

After that point, her art changed.  The loss of someone transformed her, and thus her art. Having that possibility of using art as a tool of self-mending, she did so in a way where creativity, but more than that, a deep feeling, a need presented itself. Just as Joseph Beuy’s fat came as a healing object, these materials with inscribed memories on them came as part of her art in order to work on it, remember it and then pass it on, inscribing it forever on the canvas. She put those memories in a shoebox called art, never to be opened again. 

That is why Emilia Sirrs appealed to me as an artist. She exemplified beautifully this power art can have. Art is much more than a drawing. It is more than three lines of different colours put aside to one another. It is more than a painted sofa against the wall. It is a purifying exercise, and a very exhausting one too. It is a way to put down what is on our minds and our hearts, passing that energy, wether good or bad that lives in us, onto a final object, wether to be disposed off as a bad memory or to be kept as a remembrance of something good that happened to us, just as a picture on the wall.   

This combined work, named “Ausencia” (Absence), is the triggering one that will follow on a full series of works. Emilia Sirrs, as she told me, plans to recycle all these pieces of furniture and transform them into works of art in order to close an episode in her life. I honestly cannot wait to see the rest of the serie. If it is as intense and emotional as “Ausencia”, we can truly expect to see something extraordinary. It will disting  uish from mere Sunday painters from the ones that have made art a part of themselves. 

By clicking on the title, you will directly access to the artist's webpage.