"When I first encountered Irish landscape I felt like I had been here before in some previous life. The connection was immediate. It was like painting a whisper and there's nothing more haunting than a whisper. Then I read W.B. Yeats which is all about enchantment and maybe the glamour fell on me. Irish landscape has a transcendental quality and I try to achieve in my work the essence of going beyond... away. I listen to this landscape and hear the echo of an ancient joy "

Such a surprising revelation from the daughter of an Italian mother and Ukrainian father now married to an Antrim man. Yet nothing is lost in the cultural translation. Her landscapes have all the enticement of the first encounter.

"Only with pastels can I capture the mood and atmospheric of the collision of seascape, sky and mountain. Pastels give me a language of intimacy and each of my paintings is a quotation from within me. I have touched them into existence. My empathy with the landscapes aura is in my fingertips. My work also chimes with my own inner landscape and is an echo of what I hear in Irish music especially the melancholy of lament and exile. But you don't need to read volumes about me to know what you are looking at."

The spell is in her fingertips... hauntingly

Gallery Representation Tamara's paintings are currently exhibited at: