🔥 Important FLORIDA Latino Modern Voodoo Portrait Oil Painting, Olga MANOSALVAS

This is a fantastic and Important FLORIDA Latino Modern Voodoo Portrait Oil Painting on Canvas, by renowned South Florida Keys Ecuadorian-born Modernist painter, Olga Manosalvas. Her style derives from the Classical painting techniques of Madrid, Spain, embedded with Magical Realism derived from her childhood in South America. This piece depicts a Voodoo Queen, likely from New Orleans, Louisiana, where she lived and created artwork, holding a doll in her right hand, and wearing an elaborate white military style jacket, with numerous beads, face paint, and adornments upon her. The emotion on the subject's face, and the extremely fine detail of this painting signify the hand of a master painter. Signed and dated: "Manosalvas '03" in the lower right corner. Approximately 17 x 24 3/4 inches (including frame.) Actual artwork is approximately 16 x 23 1/2 inches. Good - Fair condition, with mild - moderate dimpling to the canvas (please see photos carefully.) This can be easily remedied by steaming the canvas, or by re-stretching it, but I will leave this task to the buyer. Acquired from an affluent collection in Los Angeles County, California. Priced to Sell. If you like what you see, I encourage you to make an Offer. Please check out my other listings for more wonderful and unique artworks! About the Artist: Collections, Key West The work of Olga Manosalvas is featured at Collection Gallery on Stock Island on with “Goddesses of South Beach and Las Sirenas,” vivid, crisp and alluring.Her style derives from classical studies in Madrid and the fashion illustration she pursued at Parson’s, New York City. Influenced by Gauguin’s color and light and the German Expressionists, she is drawn by the unseen and fascinated with the spiritualism of her Ecuadorian culture. Wrapped in lush landscapes and drenched in Magical Realism, Manosalvas’ work is ever suggesting, eternally unfolding.Also featured and giving poetic commentary to the gallery’s stable of artists is a freestanding Rooster Fish, sculpted by Brad Grus, a retired metal worker, author and avid fisherman/hunter. Grus’ love of the water and eye for assemblage is a wonderful mix of talent. He uses local exotic hardwoods to orchestrate his school of wily creatures.Collections, Key West is located at 6810 Front St., Stock Island, down the dock from the Hogfish. "Have you witnessed The Visions of Olga Manosalvas yet? If not, do not miss it! Titled “The Restless Eye” — come take a trip through Olga’s work and you’ll see that she speaks multiple languages through well-defined explorations, artistic styles and mediums. Her obra de mano, or handmade work, reveals her divergent paths, observations and tics. Olga’s work is a garrison of grotesques, saints, sinners & bawling babies. No one is left untouched — characters pulled from the commedia dell’arte, zaftig cubanas and brasileiras, indigenous madres latinas...We are fortunate to have her back in Key West. Come witness her passionate pieces at Custom House Museum | Bryan Gallery until September 30th." EVOLUTIONOLGA MANOSALVASAPR 1-29, 2021/EXHIBITIONSanger Gallery Olga Manosalvas is known for her colorful paintings and sculptures which depict island dwellers, Mardi Gras revelers and voodoo queens with a distinct voice of the tropics.Olga’s latest works explore a more monochromatic plane, capturing her figures in tones and highlighting sections of skin pigments and fabrics for added emphasis. These new color shifts and style variations, provide fresh vantage point from which Olga, and her viewers, can question the everyday.Olga Manosalvas is represented by Collections, Key Westsponsored by Key West Fine Wines ARTIST BIO: Years of academic and studio painting have taken Olga Manosalvas from a world of high color and vibrant narratives to a more sophisticated, pigmented analysis of the everyday social variations of life. Olga’s work speaks multiple languages through well-defined explorations, artistic styles and mediums. This is, in large part, due to her schooling at the Academia Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain and Parson’s School of Design. Her work is influenced by her Ecuadorian ancestry, her New York upbringing, and her most recent years as a resident of the lush, exotic Florida Keys and New Orleans.Forever drawn to the representation of the figurative world, Olga’s work has transformed into the introspection of the human psyche. She sees from afar and comments with her brush. Her proclivity to depict people of color and the rituals of religion shy away from traditional concepts of beauty, bringing out the oddities of humankind. Olga Manosalvas exhibit presented by Key West Art & Historical Society at Custom House MuseumAugust 01, 2019 Olga Manosalvas is a polyglot, of sorts.Take a trip through her work and you’ll see that she speaks multiple languages through well-defined explorations, artistic styles and mediums.Her obra de mano, or handmade work, reveals her divergent paths, observations and tics. Olga’s work is a garrison of grotesques, saints, sinners and bawling babies. No one is left untouched — characters pulled from the commedia dell’arte, zaftig cubanas and brasileiras, indigenous madres latinas.Olga resurrects images seared into her primordial (and to family members, frighteningly accurate) memory. She harnesses found objects and bends them to her creative will. She breathes life into a menagerie of fantastic creatures created from insanely detailed, embroidered fabrics, dressed over crimped wire.Art is not just a vocation or calling. For Olga it’s her diet, her nutrition. As with her artwork, a simple meal prepared by Olga turns into an exploration of alchemical herbs and ingredients, resulting in something you may have dreamed of, but never before tasted. A stroll to the market becomes a moving meditation, a pilgrimage. She logs a million artistic Fitbit miles in everything she does, transforming quotidian chores into exquisite and finely attuned daily rituals.Olga is ruled by ritual. She is pulled hard and fast toward an examination of arcane rituals and she holds them up against her Christian upbringing, reverently taking what she needs, and discarding the rest. She doesn’t always choose what she creates; it often chooses her and invites her to take what she needs.Key West Art & Historical Society honors the work of Florida Keys-based and internationally exhibited painter and sculptor Olga Manosalvas in a solo exhibit entitled “The Restless Eye // The Visions of Olga Manosalvas,” which opened on Friday, July 19, in the Bryan Gallery at the Custom House Museum (281 Front St.).Olga has been a visual shaman and storyteller of sorts for more than two decades, influenced by her Ecuadorian ancestry, her New York upbringing and most recently as a resident of the Florida Keys. The New York City native studied at the Art Students League, the High School of Art & Design, the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Madrid and at Parsons School of Design. She moved to the Keys after a three-week vacation in 1980 to “live in a place that matched her ideals,” she says, eventually setting up shop first in Key West and then in Sugarloaf with the beloved ‘Baby’s Coffee’ and establishing coffee roasting plants in Miami and Breaux Bridge, La.Her work is a dazzling amalgam of acrylics, oils, embroidery, found objects and “anything that works,” she says. “I like using society’s discards in my icon pieces because I want to remake them into precious things.”An overarching theme of “La Familia” and the family circle weaves together articles of faith, the figurative and the occult in her work, as witnessed in “The Listening Man” and “Quick Fix,” two paintings in the upcoming exhibit.“The first two reflect family dynamics I’ve observed,” she says. “’The Listening Man’ is my ongoing interest in the figurative; ‘Quick Fix,’ my preoccupation with articles of faith and the expectations that come from the adoration of these.”Viewers will also glean insight from Olga’s sense of memory — a family death in Ecuador and the gathering of the family to wash and dress the departed, dreams and other family scenarios. They will be invited into a meditative realm of ritual, a mixture of Catholicism and esoteric religions she experienced as a child.“My grandmother decided that my ongoing fever spikes were a result of the evil eye,” she says. “Traditionally it is thought that if an infant is pretty, there are certain people that can make them ill with too much looking, admiring. The ritual involved a doorway, cigar ash, the breaking of an egg to examine for blood and prayer. After this, the cycle of fevers ended.”“The Restless Eye // The Visions of Olga Manosalvas” exhibit runs through Sep. 30. For more information, call Cori Convertito, Ph.D. Ladies and CigarsAficionadas: Women and Their Cigars| From Jack Nicholson, Summer 95 Cigars also have deep significance in Santeria, the African-based spiritual tradition that is popular throughout the Caribbean and Latin America and which incorporates and reworks some elements of Catholicism. According to one expert on Afro-Caribbean diaspora culture (who asked to remain anonymous), "In Santeria, tobacco is a sacred substance, and the cigar has central importance. Priests and priestesses smoke cigars in both sacred and secular contexts. Cigars elevate the smoker, regardless of gender." She adds that the smoke has two functions within a Santeria ritual: It cleanses the air and invites particular deities, who are partial to cigar smoke, down into the room. "It is a great act of respect to offer a gift of cigars, especially Cuban cigars, to a priestess [or Santera]," she says.Even for Latinos who have no direct connection to Santeria, the link between cigars, spirituality and women is a strong one. Olga Manosalvas, born in New York of Ecuadoran parents, is an accomplished painter and third-generation cigar aficionada (she picked it up from her mother, her Aunt Isabel Sirgado and her grandmother). In fact, one of her earliest memories involves a cigar put to what some might consider "unorthodox" purpose: As a young child she once had a high fever that would not break. After consulting two doctors, her grandmother became convinced that someone had given Olga the evil eye. She placed the girl in a doorway, lit a cigar and smoked it facing her granddaughter. She then collected the ashes from the cigar and "washed" Olga by rubbing them onto her skin. The fever went away.Manosalvas recently designed an illustration for a cigar box based on such practices and beliefs: It is a figure called "la cubanita," a priestess from Santeria symbology who is adorned typically in a white dress and turban. "La cubanita smokes cigars for spiritual healing and cleansing," Manosalvas explains. She adds that, while such stories and symbols enrich the cigar-smoking experience for her and for many women who share her cultural heritage, it is only part of the picture. She also enjoys the smoke, and is quite a connoisseur--"I smoke Cuban Cohibas, and when I can't get them I smoke Avos."Such use of cigars by women in homespun healing rituals is common in Latin America. Sirgado notes that she sometimes smokes "to clear the air" when she feels the presence of "ill will": "It's common to take seven ritual puffs, as a recognition of the seven Afro-Cuban deities and a way to neutralize bad influences around you. It's not really so hard to understand," Sirgado continues. "Where there is a cigar, there is mysticism."