Izabella Ortiz was born in 1964 in France. Her multicultural background—French, Australian, Colombian, and Indigenous—deeply informs her oneiric mystical visual language, processing it through her own dreams and personal travails and travels. Having moved frequently during her childhood between France, Australia, and Alaska, she was exposed to a wide range of mythologies and artistic traditions, which she absorbed even before she began her own painting. Like many of her influences she uses paint as a medium of catharsis and translation of her own experiences abstracted into thought forms.
Ortiz began painting unexpectedly in 2009, discovering her artistic voice in a moment she describes as almost trance-like. Themes of water, dreams, and ancestral memory recur throughout her practice. Provoked by a major physical and emotional crisis, life changing in scope, painting became a form of self-healing. She created it for personal balance, not for the canons of the art world.
Although her work can be thematically seen as landscapes, they are not about vast space. Indeed, she has swallowed the oceanic, internalized the sea, and kept visibility not to great inchoate depths but to the messy and tangled intensity of proximity. There are creatures, plants, and the almost psychotropic movement of line and atmosphere. In fact, it is the movement in her exquisitely colored scapes that holds our rapt attention. She combines imagery of water, blood, rain, and currents in her drawings. Those of her works not about water appear as maps, perhaps maps of the peripatetic soul alone and surviving well in animated landscapes.
In her own words:
My mother is Australian and my father French-Colombian and, as a child I lived in France, in Australia and in Alaska. My painting is impregnated by Inuit, Aboriginal and Indian myths, tales and legend…
It (painting) came to life in an unexpected way. One evening in 2009, like a sleepwalker I grabbed a painting I had at home and painted over it. Since then, I have been producing in a compulsive way. . ..
This "trance painting" loomed up after a pulmonary illness and has become vital to me. I have become what I am.
Most titles contain the word "dream" because for me, our roots grow in our dreams.
My dreams are my capacity of transcending everything I intercept, absorb, everything that impregnates me for me to better spill it all out when creating. All my paintings are "automatic" and therefore, take life directly on the paper: forms and materials whisper to me what to do.