THE BLUE BOAT
Mari Puri Herrero’s Blue Boat will be on display at Itsasmuseum through a Guest Work collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao. The work, which will be exhibited in the next few months in the museum’s temporary exhibition, will stimulate the exhibition proposal by making it a coherent part of the story.
The Blue Boat is a set of two very similar paintings, painted in shades of blue, which share a common theme, a solitary ship at sea between clouds and mist, but of different dimensions and made on different media: canvas in the case of the largest and board in the case of the smaller. If you look carefully at the two works, you will see that their images are sequential: while in the larger the cloud is in front of the ship, in the smaller one it is being left behind.
During her long artistic career, Mari Puri Herrero has painted her surroundings in multiple settings, urban, rural, and of course the sea in this painting.
Mari Puri Herrero was born in Bilbao and has deep roots in her homeland. She began her artistic career in the early sixties. Mari Puri studied in Madrid and, with a scholarship from the Biscay Provincial Council and the Dutch government, also studied in Amsterdam. This was a decisive stage when she learned about the work of James Ensor, a painter with a great influence on her. She honed her painting and engraving skills and travelled around Europe. Her graphic work was catalogued In 1982 and her drawings in 1992. Her work has been exhibited on numerous occasions both individually and collectively.