ABOUT ME

I was born on March 16th, 1971, under the sign of Pisces, and I’ve always had a determined spirit — even as a child. Whenever someone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer never changed: I wanted to become a teacher. And I did, though only for six years. In that time, the children taught me how to rediscover my own inner child — how to be free, and how to paint. After graduating from a fashion design college in 1993, I felt the pull of something greater, something unfinished within me, which led me to enroll in the Faculty of Fine Arts.

For the first two years, I learned very little. But then a change of teachers shifted everything. I learned how to laugh again. I became fascinated by the pure, abstract patterns that lie behind things and events — their elongated, essential forms reduced to a mysterious simplicity, always present, always steady. In my work, I try to maintain this connection between objects and their inner patterns, allowing myself to see — and to dream — the same reality over and over again. It is a reality where silence and stillness are essential to finding balance between oneself and the world around.

I graduated in 2000, though I was tempted to repeat a year simply because I loved the process so much. After my son, Radu, was born, I entered a period of accumulation —followed by one of intense creation. Then my daughter, Maria, arrived, and with her came an even deeper passion for painting. Motherhood brought me fulfillment and a new clarity about many things — and again, painting. Not even consistently, but always painting. I live within it.

Nora Blaj is an exploratory artist. With the help of colours, graphic signs, writing, and inserts of all kinds, she brings to the surface of her own works an interior geometry which is subjective, ontological. The equations of the images inside the frames seem to have a simple solution for the viewers. When you look at them, the answer seems to come naturally: ‘yes, I like them’.

However, the tasteful visual impact of Nora’s compositions is also due to their vital interior substance. Her works have a heart. She actually paints answers to humanity’s deep questions, and we instantly like them because we recognize many of these answers as our own. Right here, at your disposal, lies a journal that may seem impersonal (as abstract art appears to be, in most cases). But if we look closer, we discover the threads of a story written in the first person, a story of the self. A story about plunging into darkness and the light of life.

Nora brings the light to the surface, whether it is red, yellow, or orange, depending where her personal sun is: at sunrise, dusk, or noon. (Robert Șerban, Nora Blaj’s Personal Sun)

 

Nora Blaj is the lucid, temperamental type of artist. If there is something about her painting that convinces me, it has to be this eruptive energy of saturated chromatic densities, which exalts visual excitation all the way to paroxysm. But also the confessive-interrogative refluxes, a sign of sensory relaxation, which positions her in the abstract or conceptual areas of painting. (Corneliu Antim)