Edmari Hernandez Silen: Painting Analysis

Edmari Hernandez Silen was born in Puerto Rico on October 7th, 1992; however, lived many different places as she was in a military family. Growing up, her parents pushed her to pursue an art career. In 2014 she graduated from the University of North Florida with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking with a minor in Art History. She studied abroad many places, and classical artworks such as Shakespearean plays, Greek tragedies, and the renaissance and baroque eras influence her art. While currently working on a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art at the University of South Carolina, Silen teaches Drawing 111.
Silen used charcoal or oil paints in her earlier artworks; however, as she has grown as an artist expanded
Although I thought it strange at first to have a painting about coral reefs that only shows one piece of coral, after learning that this painting is supposed to encourage conservation of coral reefs, I really liked it. I liked the color choices she picked and loved the detail of the rocks and water. I thought it was interesting how she applied most of the paint for this work with a mop because of how huge it is and enjoyed hearing about the process of creating this piece.
After researching Silen and her artwork more, I discovered that she is a professional gallery artist and has had numerous exhibitions across Florida. Snorkeing in Puerto Rico inspired her piece Coral en Playa Saltinera and other paintings in her “Sea Floor” series. The baroque era, which emphasizes motion, space, time, a dramatic use of light, and a passionate theatrically and the Renaissance Era, which revived classical themes, inspired some of her earlier
Her main theme, a central idea in a piece of art, in her work is to bring awareness of coral reef destruction. She uses acrylic paint, plastic element and water mixed together, on yupo paper to achieve the desired effect. In order to create depth in her work, Edmari uses overlapping, when one object covers part of a second object. Furthermore, she uses a lot of primary colors, yellow, blue, and red, to depict the coral under the water. Her coral has visual texture, impression of actual texture or simulated texture, that shows the different ridges and craters.
This artist and her work was very interesting to learn about. Her transition from painting figures to doing water and then combining them to doing figures in the water was very neat. Her most recent works about coral conservation was the most exciting to me. I feel that those pieces actually have a cause that she is passionate about and can be used to fight for a cause that she enjoys. I thought the art was very eye opening to the problem that coral reefs in Puerto Rico are facing. I would like to see more work by her and how it will change going