• Oil pastel and graphite on paper, 29.5x21cm, 2006
  • Oil pastel and graphite on paper, 29.5x21cm, 2006
  • Felt tip pen and graphite on paper, 28x21.5cm, 2008
  • Oil pastel and graphite on paper, 28x21.5cm, 2006
  • Felt tip pen and graphite on paper, 28x21.5cm, 2008
  • Oil pastel and graphite on paper, 27.5x21.5cm, 2006
  • Oil pastel and graphite on paper, 30x20.5cm, 2010
  • Oil pastel and graphite on paper, 33x21.5cm, 2018
  • Oil pastel and graphite on paper, 33x21.5cm, 2018
  • Oil pastel and graphite on paper, 33x21.5cm, 2018
  • Oil pastel and graphite on paper, 33x21.5cm, 2018
  • Felt tip pen and oil pastel on paper, 27.5x21.5cm, 2008
Taimy Linares Ravalo
Havana, 1978

Joy and enthusiasm are two sources of inspiration for Taimy. Diagnosed from an early age with severe mental disability and abandoned soon after by her father, then her mother put all her energy to subvert any diagnosis that limits her daughter’s intellectual development, giving also a spiritual force that serves as an example to others families with similar situations.
Right after going through the first years of her childhood at a school of especial education for children with especial needs, her mother faced the challenge that she couldn’t get the girl at any other school when she was 9 years old because according to the Cuban educational system for people with disabilities, she didn’t classify to continue the especial teaching. That’s why her mother took care of her education completely, offering her a lot of affection and basic notions of life, elementary tools needed by any little kid’s growth. Regarding her development, to express herself through art, especially the drawing, has been an important tool for her since she was a small child. Drawing has helped her as a way of communication. Her works are full of color and forms, sometimes distinguishable, another just amorphous spaces and planes of colors which are interconnected and spread all over the paper. The motif most recurrent in her drawings is a representation of nature’s elements like flowers, plants and insects, imbedded in spaces that give the sensation that were set inside cavities. Some other times it recreates shapes similar to mosaics, creating singular landscapes where abstraction and the figurative painting lose their limits. They are like virgin islands of color that float in a fantasy dimension.
Another dimension of her works are the pieces where she use fabrics. When she was watching her mother working at the sewing, she showed a lot of interest and a great ability to use threads and simple types of stitches as she were using colored pencils. Her work with fabrics is similar to her drawings, interconnecting with different colors of threads the forms and patterns that she creates over pieces of leftovers of her mother’s work.