The Art of Nostalgia
Ally Burguieres Speaks Volumes through Art
Story by Libby Allen
Photos courtesy of Ally Burguieres
Seeing and understanding the undeniable connection between Burguieres’ art and her infatuation with literature is a rare and beautiful testament to the artist’s creativity and her credence of nostalgia.
Ally Burguieres, 29, paints dreamlike, surreal, and imaginative works of art. Painting is her passion, but it was not what she had originally intended to do with her life, to which her degrees in linguistics and journalism are a testament.
Though Burguieres’ degrees span a broad spectrum of subjects, the artist claims that painting encompasses everything she’s studied over the years.
“I’ve always painted to relax. In high school I used to doodle drawings. Friends started offering to buy my drawings from me for 20 bucks, and that just got amplified in college when I started selling my work online. By the time I was living in Belfast, I started thinking about what I could do long term that I wouldn’t get tired of, Burguieres said.”
The art series that Burguieres is currently working on is entitled “The Notebook Series”, in which simple black-and-white drawings are amplified on canvas painted to imitate large-scale legal pads and notebook paper.
“One of the fun things about having a gallery is you get to see the people that come into the gallery and what they connect with. It’s really nice to see that with this series, because it’s kind of sentimental for me but it’s really universal. I really like that aspect of it,” Burguieres said. “I’ve always annotated in books and underlined quotes that I’ve read and loved.
“Several of these pieces from ‘The Notebook Series’ are based on Alice and Wonder-land. I started thinking about other iconic stationary images, tokens from school days, and what people would be able to recognize from my paintings to have that same visceral reaction. So then I thought about the yellow legal pad that those doodles were always drawn on, which is how it all came together,” Burguieres said.
Seeing and understanding the undeniable connection between Burguieres’ art and her infatuation with literature is a rare and beautiful testament to the artist’s creativity and her credence of nostalgia.
