The scenes of the everyday home can become monotonous \u2013 house plants ever still, pancakes with a knob of butter, a slice of cake from the birthday party that happened long ago. But the Colorado born painter Sierra Montoya Barela makes good use of mundanity as a canvas to create new life.<\/p>\n
Sierra also worked as a product designer of homeware for Urban Outfitters Home, and more recently at West Elm Kids, a furniture store in Dumbo, New York, which all comes through in her passion for painting mirrors, shelves, vases, chairs, tables and so on. There\u2019s a curatorial eye for composition, exaggerated colours and complicated patterns that aren\u2019t scared of clashing. Sometimes, everything is so heightened that it\u2019s difficult to tell if a blue sky, adorned with fluffy clouds, is a painting hanging on a wall or in fact a window.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow we create our home spaces is endlessly interesting and there\u2019s a million different ways to create comfort,\u201d says Sierra. \u201cI like to give importance to the simple everyday objects that we live with.\u201d As well as that, Sierra sometimes disrupts the calmness of our interior lives by offering a pause through flattened perspectives or windows into different worlds.<\/p>\n
Plants play the main character in these paintings \u2013 symbolising life as much as a human figure would \u2013 sometimes her pieces feel like portraits in this sense. \u201cWe care for plants, we put them in our homes to make us feel good, we get them nice vessels to live in,\u201d says Sierra. \u201cDepending on the type of plant they can be purely decorative or they could be references to my Mexican heritage and culture. Much of the ornate tile work or clay objects or interiors in my paintings are odes to my Mexican Catholic upbringing as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a way, Sierra doesn\u2019t just depict where plants and humans live, but also creates a new place for them to live through paint \u2013 what begins as visually satisfying artworks turn into an avalanche of tributes to how we decorate our lives and the essential need to represent life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The scenes of the everyday home can become monotonous \u2013 house plants ever still, pancakes with a knob…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":214955,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-214954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214954\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}