Ileana Collazo

I learned all I needed to about creating art as a young girl in my grandmother’s garden—where I sat doing what as an adult I call meditating—that quiet spot became my temple. Many years passed before I began to give birth to the creations conceived in my early daydreams. For a while, I wrote fiction and poetry, but then my mind exploded into a galaxy of colors, shapes, and, movement. I began to paint—small pencil renderings became color temptations that led me down the path to my “Night Gardens Collection”. From there, it was a matter of “following the yellow brick road”. Today I paint flowers, bursts of abstracted shapes and colors, geometrical excursions, digital paintings, and GRAMFFITI (the first graffiti made by a grandma, for which I was baptized: IC the G). I create small worlds of movement, colors, and shapes to entice that observer to travel through my work surface—colliding with the images, finding their way around to yet another shape, and finding it as alluring to linger gazing at them as I still find it to linger in a garden; my work is also representative of the twists, turns, bumps, and alternatives each of us transverses in the course of our daily life. My paintings are my gift to the world. I was born in Cuba; and have lived in Spain, New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts. I now reside in Miami, Florida where I work and play at Collazo Art Studio with my artist husband Miguel Collazo.