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 Emanuela Harris-Sintamarian is having a busy year artistically. In addition to “Comma,” a recent solo show showcasing the Romanian artist’s eclectic mixture of silkscreen, linoleum cut prints, ink drawings and paintings at the Newark Arts Alliance’s Art House, the UD master of fine arts student also is participating in several group exhibits this year, including “A New Generation” at the Rosenfeld Gallery in Philadelphia and “Emerging Artists” at New York’s Limner Gallery. But, she is not stopping to rest on these accomplishments, judging by the variety of works-in-progress crammed into her studio in Taylor Hall.
“If you don’t work, no matter how able you are to see, you won’t be able to put it on paper,” she said, “I had a really tough professor in Romania, and I used to think, ‘Why should I do 100 drawings a week?’ But he was right.”
She traces her early creative spark, however, to her mother, who taught her to learn to read by associating the letters of the alphabet with colors. “It was a kind of game,” she explained, “She wanted to keep me inside, so she bought a big box of colored pencils and told me to choose one color for each letter.”
Many of Harris-Sintamarian’s works today still incorporate linguistics, albeit on a much more sophisticated level. The works piled around her studio reflect an intricate mix of signs, symbols and biomorphic shapes, juxtaposed with bold, graphic color.
“Some signs are really conventional,” she said, “but if you change their visual structure there is a point where they become unrecognizable and lose their conventionality. Basically, I work with the idea of representation…just the type of question changes with time.”
Harris-Sintamarian has seen quite a few changes in her own life in the last few years. After losing her mother at age 16, the now 24-year-old artist met preacher Mark Harris and his wife, Katherine, through an Episcopal church foundation in Romania. She developed a close bond with the Harrises, culminating in her adoption as an adult by the couple.
The legal adoption, she said, was not so much of a necessity as “a confirmation of a really deep connection.”
Mark Harris also helped introduce her to study in the U.S. through a 1999 church-founded student exchange program in which she worked with Native American children on a reservation in South Dakota. Encouraged by then-UD art department chairperson Martha Carothers, Harris-Sintamarian then applied to the MFA program and received a full tuition scholarship.
“I wanted to see what happens in another educational system,” she said. “My work has changed a lot since coming to the U.S.; from representative to much freer and non-representative lately.”
Her initial focus on printmaking also has changed to incorporate more elements of painting, something she says is a direct result of the “supportive and understanding professors” she has encountered at UD.
In addition to learning, Harris-Sintamarian has had the opportunity to student teach at the University as well, something she said she enjoys and would like to continue. This would allow her to bring the strengths of both her Romanian and U.S. art educations to the classroom.
She said she hopes her students will learn to judge their own works with an objective eye, and not rely so much on an assigned grade to rate their artistic development.
“Working,” she said, “is a permanent progress.”
Story by Jeanine McGann
Photos by Kathy Flickinger
May 1, 2002
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