Honoring Inner Strength

Painter and mixed-media artist Rosa Ibarra.

Rosa Ibarra is a Puerto Rican painter of people and portraits, mostly of women and children. She is inspired most by innocuous aspects of humanity: a gesture, a contemplative moment, a radiation of strength, or a quiet moment of connection between two people. Her imagery is made powerful by her attention to intimate details, and even more powerful by her use of mixed media to build up the richness of her surfaces and colors.

Artworks and Process
Ibarra’s paintings are fascinating combinations of rich personality, rich color, and rich surface. Inspired by people, especially strong women, she learns the most while observing her subjects in natural poses. Many of her portraits are tributes to women with an inner emotional strength, who have given their all to raise children and help others do the same. Her paintings elevate these unpresuming people in compositions where Ibarra adheres other elements to the oil painting to create a relief surface and contrast to the brushwork.

Rosa Ibarra, Eva. Mixed media, sea-washed glass, paper, and oil on canvas, 44 x 26" (112 x 66 cm). Image courtesy of the artist.

Ibarra chooses additional materials based on the sitter’s personality. In Mother and Daughter, she created a mosaic backdrop of sea glass that resembles Byzantine mosaics. She collects the sea glass in Old San Juan. In The Seated Muses, Luna, she used copper and silver leaf to frame her figure, an influence of Mesoamerican and South American Spanish Colonial painting. In The Missing Kernel, Ibarra’s work clearly channels the palette and brushwork of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890).

Ibarra’s figures are created from a complex, “knitted” pattern of narrow strokes of brilliant color that resemble pointillism. They have a solid presence that is visually as exciting as the materials she adheres to her paintings.

The Missing Kernel. Diptych, oil on canvas, each panel 14 x 24" (35.5 x 61 cm).

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