Tell us a bit about yourself. Who you are, where you’re from and what you do.

My name is Anda, and I live and work in London, ON, Canada. I am constantly making something, and when I’m not, I’m thinking about it. Or planning it. My works revolve around memories – I turn memories into shapes and bursts of color. And sometimes into words.

How did you get your start as an artist?

I won an art competition when I was three years old. There was no turning back :)))

What do you love most about what you do?

I love immersing myself in textures and color, and I love involving all senses in my projects. Science says that the more senses are being stimulated or involved during a process, the deeper the emotional connection with the content. And they’re not wrong. I feel this all the time while working. With collages, for example, it goes beyond the tactile experience of working with different textures. It becomes a multi-sensory experience: you have the sound of tearing paper and ripping it apart, you have the smell of chalk pastels and fixatives, the visual stimulation of painting or coloring the paper, making the cut-outs, pasting, drying, and pressing.

Besides collages, I love to work with different textures and various media combinations in my painting or textile works.

What do you find the most challenging?

Focusing on one thing or idea at a time. My mind tends to jump from one thing to another with the speed of light. I have a lot of ideas (actually, some of them are pre-ideas) that tend to pop up randomly and sometimes more than one at a time. It gets very chaotic inside my head, and I find it tough to choose what to focus on. Because of this, I ended up surrounded by many unfinished or barely started pieces that have accumulated over the years.

When things get tough, where do you find the inspiration to keep moving forward?

With my subject of work – memories - it’s more like inspiration finds me. I start reminiscing and feel the urge to turn that into a piece. But things get tough, though, at times, that’s true, and when they do, it’s usually the great outdoors or art books (or both) that do the trick.

Who is someone you admire most and why?

If we’re talking about collage artists, then my favourite artists would be Hannah Hoch and Man Ray. (I used to have a Dada obsession growing up. It started when my grandfather introduced me to Dada poetry and reached highly unusual proportions.)

Tell me something unusual that makes you happy.

Shadows. I even have an entire highlight section named “shadows at play” on my Instagram. They fascinate me, especially unusual shapes, patterns, or intricate constructions of lines of shadows and light.

Anything weird on your bucket list?

I do not have an actual bucket list, but I’d like to spend a year in a place like Svalbard (one of the world’s northernmost inhabited areas). I would like to experience the polar night and the midnight sun.

Podcast you can’t get enough of?

I envy people who can listen to podcasts while doing something else. I can’t – I either listen or do what I have to do. Because of this, I follow only a few podcasts, and my top three are Create!, Cathy Heller’s Don’t Keep Your Day Job and The Artist Entrepreneur (Catherine Orer).

How do you fuel for the day?

By daydreaming right after waking up, even if it’s only for a couple of minutes. Whether I get a 2 hr sleep night or a full night, my morning daydreaming “session” is not negotiable. It’s not planned or imposed, it just happens – but I’ve come to realize it always happens. It’s a habit I got when I was a kid: some sort of open-eye meditation, I guess. I stare out the window or at the ceiling or follow some shadows around the room and just let my mind wander. It became more intentional from the moment I started to be aware of it.

I love coffee too, but it is more of a reward. I tend to do the things I dislike (mostly administrative tasks) first thing in the morning and then reward myself with a coffee.

Tell us about your vision for the future. Go big! We want to root you on!

I am nailing the details for a couple of large-scale collaboration projects. I am beyond excited about them and cannot wait to share everything with the world. Right now, I am also working on some paintings that are part of an ongoing body of work titled Folded Memories.

Anda Marcu | @andamarcuart

Anda Marcu Interview