Sandra Manzi

I like to walk a lot and I’m always keeping my eyes open for scenes to paint particularly where the banality of the everyday is infused with mystery. They’re usually very familiar daily observances, that are part of the shared experience of living in a city. My paintings originate from observing and then photographing real people and spaces that you wouldn’t normally think of as worthy of painting them and transforming these moments into painterly compositions. I Draw my inspiration from the narratives and subtle poetry within street scenes. Sometimes I see something that is just right - people are in the right spot, pass each other at the right moment, the right light happens to be shining, or the figure to background plays off each other perfectly. A lot of my work relies on these fortuitous moments, where things just sort of happen and you're either there and ready for it or not. Through painterly realism, I focus on natural lighting, fleeting scenes and incidental moments in urban spaces, as well as summer leisure activities on promenades and waterfronts. Working with precision in observation and rendering, I explore the upstaged, incidental, and often overlooked moments of everyday life. Sometimes it’s the way light settles across a table or shines on someone's hair, and at other times it's the visual poetry found in the cacophony that makes up our urban environment. But it’s always the subtle narratives embedded in ordinary scenes that draw me in. 

 My work focuses on ideas of the spaces in which we move and connect on a regular basis. Whether of urban street scenes, airports, museums, interiors, or rural landscapes; my paintings are both voyeuristic and self-reflective depictions of my eavesdropping on the life around me. My paintings often develop through my observations of people in unstaged moments where they are going about their daily lives. I wish to capture the banality of everyday life. Using my own recomposed photographs, I transform fragments of ordinary life into visual narratives conducive to contemplation and the viewer's imagination. Each of my works shows a scene lived, observed, in which I have perceived something beautiful that has generated emotions or has caught my attention, either by some detail, or by the beauty of the whole, by the light, by the interconnections between people in the urban landscape, or by special moments or corners seen in my travels. In other words, everyday situations and attitudes, enveloped in an atmosphere of serene contemplation. I try to capture that moment in which I felt something special as an observer and capture it in an act of stopping time for a second. The light, the nature, the animals, the plants, and the people … are aspects that move me. Even the works that show reflections are not more than captured moments in which games of reflected lights manage to capture my attention. In fact, light is a major source of inspiration, in the way light hits objects and the patterns and forms this creates.