Lana Matich Privitera : Affordable art for your living rooms

Lana Matich Privitera is a Fellow Member of the American Artist Professional League and a Signature Member of the North East Watercolor Society. Mrs. Privitera has been an art instructor for over 15 years and currently teaching at the Wallkill River School of Art in Montgomery, New York. She is also an active member of several other local Art Associations and regularly exhibits in Art Galleries in the Hudson Valley area.

[Live demo of art by Lana at Northeast Watercolor Society, USA]

Lana was born at Zaragoza a picturesque city in Spain. She and her three siblings were well groomed by the strict discipline of her Spanish mother, but   a Croatian father. Her original first name in Spanish is Maria Luz. Luz means Light and as a coincidence the effects of light played a prominent role in her work when she turnout to be an artist. She says light, with its infinite variations of hue, temperature and intensity, is able to alter the mood of the objects and landscape around us. She further says, but you can’t outline the prominence of light, in the absence of darkness. But the real challenge lays on highlighting radiance of light on a well lit background. 

[The Rainbow Cups]

As a girl of three years old Lana use to scribble on the walls of her bedroom with colour crayons. For such inarticulate graffiti’s many a times she got shouting from her parents. Looking at the inclination of that tiny tot towards art, her father bought drawing sheets and water colour tubes. By the time that little girl turned to be ten years old she started drawing elaborate scenes full of detail. She was proficient at drawing human figures. By the time she passed out of high school, she has over 50 commissioned charcoal portraits and hundreds of sketches under her belt. But when a local Art School didn’t meet her expectations, Lana sets Art in the back burner and switched her career. She dreamt to be a Fashion Designer.

As a young woman with many interests, she went on chasing after few other dreams as well. Be it travelling or learning foreign languages. And that’s how in the year 1990’s she reached the promising land i.e. United States of America and finally settled over there.

It was the year 1995 when Lana developed interest in doing art with water colours. She participated in the local and regional art competitions with her urban landscapes. By the year 2002 she participated in the national level art exhibitions and started selling her art works. She not only gathered admirers of her art, but started receiving many felicitations and awards as well.

When she was blessed with motherhood, she took a break to nurture her baby. But something else was written in the destiny. The blessing of motherhood was followed by health issues. She encountered with poor vision. It put her art career in exile for almost long ten years. It was the year 2013 Lana returned to paintings. But by then Internet played a big role in every sphere of life. Instead of conventional art magazines Lana explored art in the internet. On exploring the new techniques of doing art, her career took off to the higher spheres.

Iron box

As a mother, wife, businesswoman, artist and teacher Lana got multi roles to play in life. She struggles hard to find time to paint as much as she could. She prefers to paint when she knows she has several free hours of uninterrupted peace. She usually sets aside a whole week for painting. Her modus operandi of working is different. Most of the artists undertake only one assignment at a time. They keep working on it, until they finish it. But Lana is made of a different genre. At one go she starts several paintings all at the same time. But later as per the whims of her mind she picks only one specific piece of work and keeps working on it, until reaching the perfection.

She attributes her success in art to God saying He was kind enough to fulfill all the basic needs of her life.  Even though she got a small studio, yet she could afford to buy all the inventories which are often pretty expensive and any other aspiring artists unable to afford to buy them.

Silk

She chose watercolors as her medium because of the ethereal and luminous effects that it gives and for the inherent difficulties that involved to do art with it. She says the challenge of creating hyper-realistic paintings in such a difficult medium is quite an exhilarating experience. One of her master piece titled “Silk” is worth a watch. This piece of fabric which she painted is an antique Chinese wall cloth that her brother brought for her from a trip to China. She placed a Delftware vase over it which complemented it perfectly. She had bought that little vase in a church Sale for just a couple of dollars.

This world has seen many great artists be it Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Caravaggio or be it Rembrandt. But their art works are no more relevant to the socio economic scenario that we live in the Twenty First Century. Whereas the art of Lana are so enigmatic and heart warming that they elevate our souls to the  higher spheres.

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