The Portraits series began in 2010, the year after a cancer diagnosis, at the studio of Patricia Cabaleiro, artist and teacher, in Singapore. Patricia gave the canvas. She gave the paint. She taught acrylic, stamping, and collage, and opened a door to abstract art that has never closed. That first painting, Whole (2010), was only the second painting Paula Marcondes had ever made. It was a self-portrait. The series has been growing ever since.

 

Working in acrylic and collage on linen, Paula Marcondes does not paint likenesses. She paints what surrounds a person: the field of energy, presence, and essence that physical form contains but cannot fully hold. Each work requires a particular quality of attention, the same quality the ACT practice names as its foundation. You have to look past the surface to what is actually there.

 

The pandemic lockdown in Singapore in 2020 and 2021 brought a sustained period of stillness and proximity. Self-portrait (2020), Glenn (2020), Us (2020), Family constellation (2021), and Redenção (2021) were all made in that time, in that silence.

 

Michael (2021) began at a dinner table, with a voice the artist had learned to listen to. She offered to paint for a woman she had just met, describing a specific anatomical heart she kept seeing, one with what looked like an anchor in a vein. The woman had lost her brother weeks before, a Marine commander, killed by a driver who was texting. That night the artist could not sleep. She painted through the night, her arms spreading colour directly from the bottles when the brush refused. When she stopped, wings of all colours surrounded the heart at the centre. On the back, a collage built around a bent photograph of a turtle shell: the commander’s nickname for his sister. The painting later travelled to New York, where his widow and three daughters saw it for the first time. His wife said she could see that Michael was well, surrounded by light and colour and energy. That was healing.

 

Sharlyn (2021) followed. An extraordinary connector of people: a heart at the centre of everything that flows between them. The paint came directly from the bottle again, as it had with Michael. The materials had shown the artist a new language, and she used it.

 

Connected (2022) and Free (2022) arrived later, painted in Brazil. Both were given away before the artist fully understood why: one to a woman she had just met, one to a doctor whose courage she had witnessed for years. Connected shows the brain linked to the universe. The woman it was given to later revealed she was a stroke survivor. The painting had known before the painter did.

 

The Portraits series is ongoing.

 

Portraits gives form to and extends the Awareness dimension of the ACT practice, Paula Marcondes’ thirty-year artistic research framework.