Izabella (Iza) Thomas

Iza’s Artist Statement

Iam a visual artist based in Northern Virginia. I paint oil on canvas.

My goal as an artist is to provide through my art a vision of the world that incorporates realism, magic and the voiceless ghosts of experience. I bring an immigrant's lived life of being settled and unsettled at the same time where the familiar and unfamiliar are constantly intermingling.

I would describe my style of painting as Magical Realism. When I was a young girl, I fell in love with Magical Realism books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende,Julio Cortazar and others. I still like Magical Realism but now I paint it.

I try and tell stories through my paintings, short stories that each viewer of my painting can then take and re-imagine according to their own lived lives. I find myself in astonishment as to what they see and what they bring to what is there. I am firmly of the opinion that art helps us exist in this world just as much as air and it brings joy as well as insight to that existence.