User:Scwyer/sandbox

Irene Hardwicke Olivieri is a contemporary artist working and living in the high desert of central Oregon, and, more recently, Arizona. She was born in [insert date here] and grew up in southern Texas along the Rio Grande River. Her father was a farmer and grew cabbages and onions. At the age of 17, Olivieri moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil as an exchange student, where she traveled on a cargo boat along the Amazon and traveled back to Texas through South and Central America. She is the sister of American film director Catherine Hardwicke.

Education
Olivieri attended school in Austin, Texas and received her M.A. from New York University. Before moving to central Oregon, Olivieri worked as a gardener and lecturer at The Cloisters in New York City. She is an academically trained artist.

Art: Style and Aesthetic
Olivieri uses materials and detritus like salvaged wood to create her artworks. She focuses on themes of environmentalism and wildness, weaving text into intricate oil paintings of flora, people, and fauna. Olivieri's paintings combine language and imagery to represent our connection to the natural world, and especially to highlight the female-nature connection. Animals like pack rats and cougars can be found in her paintings, and natural history verbiage and taxonomies written along the margins. In the Los Angeles Times, Olivieri's work is described as "richly folkloric, characterized by a magical intermingling of human, plant and animal life ."

Self-Portraiture
Olivieri uses unconcealed symbolism, often creating self-portraits where the artist is blended with nature. Pomegranate, the publisher of Olivieri's 2014 catalog (Irene Hardwicke Olivieri: Closer to Wildness), describes her self-portraiture as "canvases [that] address the nature of love and bereavement, present or past relationships, and parts of life that are often subterranean: family secrets, obsessions, and personal transformations ."