Trina Lerner Brammah
"My heart resides in the Amazonian jungle of Peru, where i began my education of understanding and communing within the natural environment. My paintings are the integration of my experience, education and healing through art.
While living in Peru I have discovered the power and healing energy in all living things.... in the Earth, rivers, plants and mountains; the realization that there is healing properties in the actual materials used in creating art. The colors i paint with are all natural pigments found in the jungles and mountains of Peru. Earth/clay and minerals collected from the Sacred Valley, Cuzco and plants, trees and stones found here in the jungle."
Trina is the director of the Sachaqa Art Center in San Roque De Cumbaza, Peru, where she is working towards a long-term goal of creating an Eco Artist Community/School for artist professionals and students from all over the world. The idea is that the artists will live, learn, and create while living closely to the natural environment.
Originally from Bradford, she originally came to South America to live with a semi-nomadic tribe in Bolivia. Brammah’s intention was to become a part of nature, for her work to have more substance. Trina has traveled through Bolivia, and back to Peru where the Shamans and healers of the Sacred Valley Machu Picchu opened her to a new world found in nature.
Three years ago she made a promise to herself that she would no longer buy factory processed paints; the history of where the material came from was far more important to Brammah than range of colour. She began by collecting earth colours from the mountains of Lamay in the Sacred Valley of Machu Picchu. She then stumbled across a river in the jungle of Chazuta, San Martin which holds many different tones of yellow, red, green, grey, brow, pink and purple.
Brammah grinds all these colours by hand and mixes them with a binder to
make paint. Each of the colours she finds has a history and a story.
Through a BA Honors Degree in Fine Art at Sunderland University Trina studied sculpture, which has influenced her work; the process of making sculpture now translates into painting. The rhythms and patterns are used in the same way indigenous painting and crafts are produced, to transmit the feeling of spirit.
“The meanings and messages in my work are entirely abstract and open to interpretation. The intension is that we feel the healing properties that pass through the natural materials used and images seen in a ‘Dreamtime’ state.“
“I have many goals for the future one of which being to grow and produce more plant-based colours. I am learning from the Shapibo artisans of Pucallpa, how to fix and paint with plants and trees found naturally in the Jungle. My mission is to research every existing native artisan in Peru, to introduce such techniques into my own work. We offer courses through the ‘Sachaqa Art Center’ in traditional ceramics, weaving textiles, natural paper making (using the leaf and the stem rather than the bark of a tree,) traditional dance and basket weaving.”
www.sachaqacentrodearte.com