Working in oils (and sometimes adding collage), I use classical painting techniques to pursue a number of threads with equal enthusiasm. I work from photographs I’ve taken for reference, existing vintage photos, or images found online. My work is sometimes driven by my political and moral beliefs, but mostly it’s simply a result of my desire to create something beautiful. The results of these attempts are often narrative-driven, sometimes they touch on the surreal, and are often comic, ironic and absurdist.

Having worked with one of the largest collections of photography in Australia over the last twenty years as a picture librarian at the State Library of Victoria, I am heavily influenced by photography and film, and the ‘truths’ that they reveal.

All of my work – as an artist and as a curator - is about truth in one way or another. Truth revealed by irony, humour, cynicism, quoting, appropriating, recontextualising, fragmenting and reassembling. What truths are told? Truths about forgotten ones; truths about ourselves. To choose ‘this one’ (this narrative, this person, this place, this belief) is to ignore ‘that one’. The truth is that a collector or curator, or an artist looking for subject matter, tells lies. My hope is that my work invites the viewer to do a double-take and think about the complexity of stuff.

Influences: Notions of alienation and loneliness. Image nausea and product nausea. Edward Hopper, Mamma Andersson, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Andrew Wyeth, David Hockney, and many other artists – too many to name.

Questions that occupy me: Is all of today's art about art? Why are women complicit in misogyny? Grief is not character building (ok, that’s a statement, not a question). Is neutrality possible? How can I make a difference?

Contact:

Email: otsara@ozemail.com.au

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Olga-Tsara-Paintings/1464822070438355?ref=hl