The Portuguese word “saudade” has no equivalent in English. In Portugal, though, it is used to describe a melancholic longing for a beloved person or place separated by time and distance from the person experiencing the feeling.
For Gina DeMario, who used the term as the title of her current exhibition of abstract mixed-media paintings at the Indian River County Courthouse, saudade describes her feelings for her Detroit childhood that underlie many of the 28 works on view.
Composed of acrylic paint, marker ink, spray paint and found photos from the Internet (printed in black and white and collaged or otherwise transferred onto the canvas), the paintings present the worn and battered aspects of Detroit’s inner-city architecture as well as the spontaneous complexity of the graffiti that overlays it.
They range in size from 20 by 24 inches (“Northville” and “People Movers”) to a 72-inch wide triptych (“Verbose”). Most measure a respectable 48-by-36 inches in a vertical format. The exhibition occupies public thoroughfares and waiting areas on all three floors of the courthouse.
DeMario says that she has long been drawn to modern ruins.
“A lot of the buildings in my paintings are abandoned, vacant buildings in Detroit,” she says, citing the 3.5-million-square-foot Packard auto plant as one of them.
“That’s where I’ve always been drawn to,” she says. “I call it beauty and the breakdown.”
Created over the past two years, the show’s earlier works marry red, hot pink, aqua and ultramarine passages to a basic palette of black, white and gray. Her most recent paintings eschew bright colors completely, relying entirely on texture and graphic juxtapositions of light and dark values for their impact.
DeMario employs a slash and burn technique in which glimpses of photo collage or previously applied paint layers have been not quite obliterated by subsequent over-paints, scribbles and stenciled or freehand areas of spray-painted calligraphy.
“Sometimes I want a controlled chaos, and at other times I just want chaos,” she says of her results.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, DeMario’s parents divorced when she was 4. At 8 she moved to Detroit with her mother, the present Pamela Tan, upon the latter’s marriage to Melih Tan.
DeMario’s interest in art moved along with her.
“I was always an artist since I was little,” she says.
About the time she began researching colleges in high school, her father, Michael DeMario, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
The shocking news about her father made DeMario narrow down her school decision to one that would be within proximity to her dad, who lived in Ohio.
“So I could be closer to home when things got bad,” she says.
Fortunately for her, in 1995 DeMario was one of only 14 students accepted by Ohio University’s School of Art to its undergraduate painting program. She graduated in 2000 with a double major in architectural design and painting. Sadly, her father died when she was halfway through her college career.
DeMario says it was an “honor and a privilege” to attend the university. She found a mentor there in one of her professors, abstract painter Guy Goodwin.
“He was helpful in pointing out artists that I needed to keep an eye on. Because if you’re not careful, you can accidently reinvent the wheel, stylistically. That’s what I did accidently, and I was reprimanded for it: ‘You’re not doing your homework. You should have known this has already been done!’”
DeMario pauses and smiles.
“I was like, ‘So – I’ve been channeling Frank Stella?’”
Painters whose work she has intentionally been inspired by include those minimal masters of restraint, Brice Marden, Sean Scully and Christopher Wool.
During her junior and senior years, DeMario and a few of her friends would drive to Vail, Colorado, to work in its ski shops and restaurants during winter break. The good times she experienced there induced her to move to Denver – a couple hours away from Vail – after graduation.
DeMario lived in Denver for 16 years, working at first as sale associate for a designer showroom, and then as an interior architect.
She might be in Denver yet had she not developed an infection that got out of hand.
“I was very, very sick. I couldn’t live on my own at that point.”
Her mother and stepfather (who by that time had moved to Vero Beach) flew to Denver, where they stayed with DeMario for about a month before bringing her back to Vero.
After reestablishing herself in Florida, DeMario again fell gravely ill. A religious person, she believes that the “power of prayer” (her own, and friends’) helped her pull through.
That, and art.
“It was after I recovered – after about four months of lying in bed, combing the walls with my own thoughts – I just got on the computer and started looking at images,” she says.
“It really opened up my window of creativity that had been closed for quite a while.”
She began taking painting classes from Deborah Gooch at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, following the popular teacher for another class or two after Gooch opened her own teaching studio.
Eighteen months ago DeMario teamed up with her mom Pamela (also an interior architect as well as a representational painter in oils) to form Tan & DeMario Designs. Together they work to stage houses on the real estate market, working in concert with Realtors to make the homes’ interiors picture-perfect for prospective buyers.
Decluttering and decorating in neutrals and vibrant accents are key values in staging a home, DeMario says, adding that home buyers generally make a decision about a house within moments of entering it.
That’s where DeMario’s paintings sometimes come into play. In staging an otherwise vacant home, she will often hang one or more of her abstract canvases in strategic spots to enliven – or as she puts it, “freshen” – an unbroken expanse of wall.
That doesn’t mean she’d use all of her works. “I’m not going to put one of my graffiti paintings in a house to be staged,” she says.
Instead she hangs paintings that are long on dynamism and short on decay, urban or otherwise. Works of this type can be seen on the third floor of the courthouse show.
One real estate client, captivated by the look of DeMario’s paintings in her staged house, bought them all.
While DeMario was very pleased by the sale, she was not particularly surprised by it.
“The work looks amazing in that house,” she says.
“Saudade,” an exhibition of mixed media paintings by Gina DeMario, continues at the Indian River County Courthouse through Sept. 14. Located at 2000 16th Avenue in Vero Beach, the courthouse is open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.