Tamara Wyndham

Tamara Wyndham has been making art all her life; encouraged by her mother, an artist. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, she studied traditional drawing and painting at California State University, Long Beach; and more experimental drawing, book works, and performance at the University of California at Irvine.

Ms. Wyndham has been awarded artist residencies at the Henry Street Settlement, the Kate Millett Art Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Mariz Ceramic Workshop in the Czech Republic, Fundación Valparaíso in Mojácar, Spain, and an artist’s fellowship from Earthwatch to work in Orce, Spain.

Contact prints of the body have a tradition in sacred arts, often functioning as evidence of the physical existence of divine or holy persons. We know the Shroud of Turin, the footprints of Buddha and Mohammed, prehistoric cave hand prints, and the thumb print signature. The message of the hand print, foot print, or body print is “I was here”. There is also a sense of a straightforward image not interpreted by the artist’s imagination: a direct impression.

The process of making the work involves one or more actual contact body prints. I put paint on the model’s body, and press it onto a surface. Then I paint color around it and in layers over it, working further with brushes, my fingers, airbrush, and splattered painting techniques. The layers, adding both physical and metaphorical substance, enhance the original print, as well as building up a glow, so that the aura becomes luminous.

It is through the body that we experience pain and ecstasy, immanence and transcendence. I draw upon those spiritual traditions that honor living in the body. The body is a site of life and death struggle. My art evokes complex and intense emotions both joyful and troubling, and intensely spiritual. I seek to invoke in the viewer a sense of awe for our existence.

My art connects emotion, spirit, and body. Nudity in my art is not simply sexual display. It expresses honesty, openness, and freedom. I work in the tradition of the “Aesthetic Gnostics” – that my paintings would bring a shift in consciousness – a transcendence – in the viewer. I seek to invoke a sense of awe for our physical and psychic existence.