Olivia Sanchez is a painter based in Portland, Oregon. While she is primarily self-taught, she’s received painting and drawing instruction from working artists at several private studios and community art organizations across the city.
Sanchez primarily works in acrylic and oil, and occasionally incorporates mixed-media elements in her art. Her recent work has been displayed in a gallery show at the Oregon Art Center (formerly the Oregon Society of Artists) and in a community show hosted by the Portland Art Guild.
She was born in Maryland in 1995 to a Mexican American mother and a Colombian immigrant father. She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Portland and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, both of which inform her approach to art.
Though she has been painting and drawing consistently since she was a small child, her commitment to her art practice was renewed in 2023. She works out of a private studio in North Portland.
Statement
I’m a queer Latina painter for whom art is the only way through.
I use acrylics and oils to make paintings about identity and experience out of my studio in Portland, Oregon. My paintings either come together in a matter of hours, or over the course of several years. Sometimes I am able to fluidly translate my feelings and vision into a complete composition. Other times, the layers of paint on my canvas represent long periods of anguish, struggle, and eventually, hope.
Outside the studio, I use water colors or oil pastels as a way to process the world around me. Currently, my art is about the beautiful challenge of being close to people, the risk of not staying true to oneself and the terrible fate of not knowing what will happen next.
I am a representational artist, but I am not a camera.
I am inspired by the way Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez used magical realism to transport his readers, the way Mexican painter Frida Kahlo made folk art-inspired self portraits about suffering, and the sense of inherent truth portrayed by American painter Kerry James Marshall.
Broadly, my work is rooted in my family’s heritage, Latinidad, and the beauty of the natural world.
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