Nuria Garcia Miró

Nuria Garcia Miro grew up with the smell of paint in the house. Both her parents are artists, Nuria Miro and Antonio Garcia Soler, so canvases, easels and brushes were simply the furniture, and she absorbed the technique long before she decided she wanted it.

Her first career was somewhere else entirely. She spent years in the corporate world, working in marketing and design, before deciding to paint full time. She calls it a leap of faith, and that idea of the leap turns out to be the centre of everything she has made since.

The sea runs through her parents' work, and she keeps water in hers as a nod to them, though she uses it for something different. She paints the moment of jumping from a waterfall: cascades of water with people flowing down them, hundreds of small human figures caught mid-leap. Friends, couples, children, teenagers, whole families, all expressing the same appetite for life. The water is the metaphor and the leap is the subject.

She works in abstraction because it lets her express feeling without restriction, building character through clean geometric shapes and vivid colour set against natural organic forms. Her mixed media technique includes small two-dimensional sculptures on the surface, another nod to her parents, contrasted against flat luminous colour.