Ana de Lara

Customized nature

statement

Ana de Lara has been working in visual arts since 2019 as a way to express her thoughts, reflections, and emotions about the surrounding nature.

Plants aren’t just a backdrop; they’re living beings with their own language. By «customized nature» Ana de Lara refers to the nature that’s been altered for beauty or practical reasons in cities, like parks and gardens. It includes all the modified forms within the plant world. Through painting, she wonder if it’s selfish to change nature solely for its looks, and their work aims to take the viewer to a strange world, questioning the line between what’s natural and what’s man-made.

Ana de Lara’s creative process started during walks where she found bushes and trees with identical patterns, making her think about the effort and reasons behind it. To create references, involving artificial intelligence in image creation introduces new ideas that blend reality and fiction. Through painting, she wants to make the feeling of oddness stronger and feed into fiction.

In their studio, she uses photos and images made by AI, but the core of their work is drawing many bushes that mix geometric and organic shapes. Afterward, most of their paintings go through a process of breaking down and rebuilding on the canvas, leaving visible traces of the process.