Tamara Jovandic-Everson

Much of your work appears to draw upon the dramatic visual rhetoric of the Italian Baroque, particularly the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio. Yet your paintings do not simply quote this tradition. Instead they seem to transform it into something psychologically contemporary. How do you understand this historical dialogue within your practice, and what does the Baroque offer you as a painter attempting to articulate modern emotional and existential conditions?
What interests me in that tradition is ability to stage emotion through light, gesture and tension. Chiaroscuro for me have dramatic but also pshychological effect:
it creates a space where figures emerge from darkness in very theatrical and intimate way.