Josi Stephens 2016-10-20 05:01:44
IUNA TINTA’S RIGHTEOUS PATH
Iuna: Large, black Amazonian bird.
Tinta: Ink.
Corinne “Iuna Tinta” Weidmann has that thing—that dive-deeperthan- the-ocean thing, that reach-higher-than-the-highest-mountaintop thing, that wild-hearted energy that pushes you past easy and into a brighter, stranger, more raw kind of thing. And as luck would have it, all of those things come together like a choir when she paints.
Corinne was the newest artist to join the Asymbol Gallery lineup when I started at the company in 2014. She was the first artist I had ever really worked with, and you always remember your first. She showed a solid connection to snowboarding alongside a fine art energy only a few people possess. When it comes to her work, she’s a house on fire; a rare trait in our handshake-driven world. By the time we met, she had a few skate and snow graphics under her belt and was already on the righteous path. In two short years she has hammered out graphics for Roxy/Mervin Manufacturing, artist series gloves for Pow, and taken part in multiple sold-out art shows alongside Asymbol heavyweights like Mike Parillo and Jamie Lynn. As an artist, especially one who rides, few things are greater than finding your art underfoot.
“I started snowboarding around 20 years ago,” Corinne says. “I sucked terribly at skiing and never really got out of the beginner’s class. Luckily, a snowboard made it into our classroom, a class that I had with Nicolas Müller. One year later, we all started riding together.”
She was hooked. The snowboard is the magic carpet that takes us into another world, a link between our bodies and the Earth. But she didn’t progress straight into a juxtaposition of snowboarding and art.
“I didn’t know what to do for work for a long time,” Corinne says. “There just seemed to be absolutely no job that I liked. I was only interested in art and philosophy—basically the nightmare combination of every parent. I was everything, from dishwasher to mechanic, but finally found my place at art school. I loved it, every single day of it. Everyone was just like me.”
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in graphic design from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lucerne, she became a graphic designer, and later a freelance artist and illustrator. In 2010 she made a break for it, leaving Switzerland to see the world, and found herself in a Costa Rican village. Thus began a trip she’s still on, taking up residency in Canada, London and now Berlin. You could say she’s is a citizen of the world with an ever-evolving style to match.
Corinne came up surrounded by some of our planet’s most grand physical and social environments. Erlinsbach, her childhood home, is located on the Swiss Plateau, a complex geological zone that rests on what is called the Crystalline Basement. Sandwiched by the Jura Mountains on one side and the Aare River on the other, the Swiss Plateau is absolutely as romantic, quaint and grand as every postcard makes it out to be. The mountains loom in the background and the river winds like a lazy, fat snake below. Growing up among that kind of raw beauty is bound to mold a person. “My brothers and I spent our childhood mostly outdoors, so I was a bit of a tomboy,” Corinne says. “We’d climb trees, dam streams, behave like pirates. I was sure that the origin of every fairy tale could be found in our forests.”
She may have been right—all stories do come from some bit of truth, after all. This enchanted upbringing bled into her art and her mind—over the years Corinne has become increasingly dedicated to furthering her education. With an upcoming artist residency in northern Iceland, which focuses on life in the darkness, she will be digging radically deeper into her art. Cori says in Iceland she will “explore the life of people, plus the landscape on the edge of the Arctic Circle. This will not specifically relate to conservation, but to living close to nature; how people directly rely on it in places that are extreme. Apart from that, I’ve always wanted to experience how it feels to live far up north, where the sun does not rise in winter.”
The more she discovers, the more vivid and loaded with truth her art becomes. In a community where everything rests on the health of our planet, Cori’s dedication to observing and sharing the beauty of it all is her most revolutionary act yet.
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Close To Nature
https://digital.thesnowboardersjournal.com/articles/close-to-nature