Ana Maria Hernando moved to Boulder 22 years ago because the city had a contemporary art museum, and because she thought it would be a good place to raise her three young children after a divorce.
After growing up in Argentina, the artist first came to the United States to attend the University of California, Berkeley. From there, she moved to Boston, then to Boulder, which she found collaborative and welcoming.
“When I moved here, I felt how much things were waiting to be done. There were a lot of possibilities,” she said. “People were very open. They didn’t have the attitude you would find on the East Coast. I loved that.”
Hernando also began to paint flowers when she came to Boulder, a subject matter that has become a core of her work.
“Nature is very important in my works and my beliefs. It grounds me,” she said.
But why flowers?
“First, they are beautiful,” she said. “Even though I paint flowers, I do it more from the abstraction – the enchantment they have in their movements, their grace, their lines and also what they mean for our hearts.”
She adds that flowers are a “beautiful mirror of what life is. (It’s) a very concentrated and quick way of seeing from birth all the way to death, the recycling of those energies going back into the earth. It feels very much like generosity. In life, they are intended to be all about beauty.”
Hernando also does installation work, usually including fiber art. This is about what she calls “women’s work,” meaning the way in which women come together to create. The first group she worked with were cloistered nuns, who embroidered fabric for her. She also works with women artisans in the Andes.
“I have mostly used their wares for my installations,” she said. “They are all very spiritual women that are in the world bringing beauty also connected to the spirit.”
Hernando believes that modern culture makes it harder to find such things.
“The computer, the phone, in some ways they shatter us, make our measure so much smaller,” Hernando said. “Nature and the spirit expand us. That’s something in my work … I would like for people to feel that.”
