YOLANDA SÁNCHEZ was born in Havana, Cuba and emigrated to the United States in 1960. She obtained a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in 1979, and has practiced and taught psychology at the graduate level for over 30 years. Prompted by a personal crisis in her mid-thirties, Yolanda decided to give voice to her creativity and returned to school, obtaining a BFA and subsequently, an MFA from Yale University in painting. While at Yale, she studied with the British painter, John Walker, who became a mentor, and with Andrew Forge and David Pease, among others. Yolanda is a Fulbright scholar, completing her fellowship as a painter in Spain after she graduated from Yale. Her Fulbright project focused on four Spanish painters: El Greco, Goya, Miró and the abstract painter, Tàpies.

Currently, Yolanda lives and works in Miami Beach, Florida. She conducts "research" in the natural landscape – largely influenced by color, texture and light - and paints in her studio. Her work is never a direct translation of what she sees, but rather is an expression of a felt experience, a memory of or desire for the experience. The paintings are also informed by a variety of sources: the physical world, literature – and particularly, poetry, dance, calligraphy and Asian art. She works with oils on both paper and canvas.

ARTIST STATEMENT:
The experience of love is as close as most of us get, after childhood's end, to feeling that we are not bound by our skin, that the circumference of self can be moved or penetrated or dissolved in union with another…our surrender to love is a touching of skin to cancel out that boundary. (Nachmanovitch)

My work, in general, is a search for re-enchantment, for a way to reach below the surface of things, to find that point of connection with life. I want to engage the viewer in a sensory experience, one that is un-camera-like, un-computer-like. My goal is to nudge the viewer into a deeper experience of the present, where the "circumference of self" is dissolved - to provide a moment of contemplation without literally telling a story.

The current series, loosely based on a metaphorical concept of the garden, continues the search for "re-enchantment." It attempts to evoke an experience through the relationship of surface marks, the material of the paint itself and color, alluding to an abstract garden - a place set apart, penetrating the "circumference of self," where awareness is expanded and the senses enriched. The works are constructed as a kind of palimpsest, a layering of forms and feelings, providing a point of departure with multiple meanings.