Olga Oro ArtAlkemyst

Olga is a Mexican-Spanish artist, designer and polymath, based in Guildford, Surrey, UK. From a young age, creativity and curiosity were part of her DNA. Her grandmother, educated in Fine Arts in "Bellas Artes de Madrid", taught her to paint the oil technique at the age of nine. Later she studied graphic design where she learned various artistic techniques and perfected the acrylic. In 1997 her thesis focused on paper, recycled paper and its various manufacturing methods, as well as a catalogue of recycled paper, obtaining the highest grade for the content and documentation derived from the research. She worked as a graphic designer from 1999 to 2003. In 2005, she started as an entrepreneurial developing designs and products for her own companies. Since 2020, she has been drawn to watercolour, its luminosity and versatility, creating her own alchemical palette of colours. Some of her sources of inspiration are Albrecht Dürer (polymath and her favorite artist), nature, the Celtic legacy, Queen Victoria and two pioneering Victorian women in their fields; Marianne North (painter) and Julia Margaret Cameron (photographer) and the Danish spiritual artist Hilma af Klint. Her conceptual artistic name: ArtAlkemyst came through the connection with the 'ætheric field’, (also known as the ‘inspiration of the muses’) and means: Artist, Alchemist and Mystic. Practitioner of Al-Kimia (Alchemy), a concept that sublimates ancestral wisdom through art, materialised in "artistic talismans".   Her artistic practice focuses on flowers, botany, alchemical and intuitive experimentation. Since 2022, the floral focus has been on dahlias, the Mexican national flower, known for the Aztecs who cultivated them as medicine, food and ornament, whose legacy is transcendent worldwide. Combining graphic study and painting "in situ", with scientific-historical documentation in the following sites: the UNAM Botanical Garden (National Autonomous University of Mexico), the San Angel Flower Fair in Mexico City. In London: Chelsea Physic Garden, Holland Park, Kew Gardens and RHS Garden Wisley (Royal Horticulture Society) in Surrey where they keep the world registry of dahlias (currently of more than sixty five thousand varieties), RHS Lindley bookstore and the British Library, Kensington Palace and its gardens. The Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid, Spain. As an artist-alchemist, she experiments with different techniques and media such as conté, pastel, charcoal, acrylic, ink, calligraphy on rice paper, among others. Her art incorporates thirty years of experience in various fields that were ancestrally known as science and art, now unified sciences: geometry and sacred mathematics, alchemy, philosophy, art, quantum physics, hence the concept of polymath. And they are reflected in her sketches, drawings, watercolours and the creation of three-dimensional floral collages of various kinds. Showing that through art and science can be created concepts with ancestral and scientific support.