ABOUT
Personal Profile
“Persistence, patience, and being proud of yourself: it’s so unique and no one else does it exactly like you do. Everyone should be able to experience that… in painting you are only in your head with yourself and it’s therapeutic and lovely.” Indra Zievinger on making art.
Indra Zievinger is a self-taught artist from Trinidad and Tobago and based in the Dutch- Caribbean Island of Aruba. She is a passionate artist that has been creating since early childhood. Using Bristol board, she would transform her bedroom walls into one large canvas, using crayon and pencils to illustrate scenes of Trinidadian island life. At the age of 15 she would skip the business studies classes she was expected to attend and could instead be found in art classes. There she learned about various mediums like watercolor and charcoal. Today, her favorite medium is acrylic which she uses to paint on almost anything she can get it to dry on like eggshells, coconut husks, rocks, walls, wood panels, and of course canvas.
Travelling through the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Curaçao, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Lucia, Jamaica, and Barbados, her art has always been a connection between herself and new communities.
Through the years she has volunteered and taught at various schools with and without existing art programs. She has also been involved in public ceremonies such as the 10th Anniversary of the Gros Islet fire station in St. Lucia; she unveiled a community centered custom piece where pre-existing large rocks became a bright colorful turtle painted by herself and the youth group center.
Today, she has returned home to Aruba where she has her family home with husband Ferry Zievinger. After a few years of settling back into the island she has begun to host art classes where the emphasis is on the process of art: engaging with yourself in a project and feeling empowered in experiencing your creativity. Her attitude towards painting is a grounded and therapeutic one, she believes that true art is created in the process of learning, when one feels calm and is open to getting to know yourself better. Though she organically creates every day, she also accepts commissioned works from international clientele, teaches her own classes, and enjoys attending those from other artists.
Some of her favorite projects over the years include using a magnifying glass on eggshells to create realistic landscapes with acrylic paint, working with large rocks outside of the Gros
Islet fire station in St. Lucia, a collaborative scenic work of fish done with her best friend Peter Balliere, and using coconut husk as inspiration for an elephant.