Candida Alvarez

Adjust your eyes began as a pencil drawing on Yupo paper, inspired by a vintage snapshot of her father. The creative process turned the photograph into a fluid composition of shapes and texture which became the beginning point for the screenprint. Through the proofing process, Alvarez reimagined the pencil marks as separate layers of ink, building up towards a print of surprising character, rich with texture and depth of color. A green form playfully escapes the print's right edge.

The title, Adjust your eyes, is one of ten spontaneous thought waves that the artist created in early 2021, beginning with every first letter in the word PALIMPSEST. In her studio experimentation, she used play-doh to create cursive writing on the top of her glass palette painting tables. The work was saved using an iPhone. The words went back into becoming a ball of soft and squishy color, easy to roll up and re-use.

Widely recognized as an innovative painter, Candida Alvarez is the consummate “multihyphenate” artist that has expanded her practice with drawings, installations, collage, and printmaking throughout her forty-year career. Introduced to printmaking in the '70s at El Museo del Barrio, she worked out of the Robert Blackburn Workshop in the '80s; and in the '90s received a MFA from the Yale School of Art in Painting and Printmaking. Alvarez’s lithograph Nueva York, 1991, is in the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of Art, printed by Derrière L’Étoile Studios. She has created limited edition prints with Spudnik Press, Hummingbird Press Editions, and The Brandywine Workshop, among others.