“When you’re drawing or painting, you tend to lose your sense of time, your consciousness is raised, and you are in a creative space. That’s a place I have to go to,” says Amalfi Ramirez Finnerty CGS’87.
In August, Finnerty’s art literally transported her from the Philadelphia area to England, where she began one year of teaching and painting on a Fulbright grant. The Venezuelan-born painter will be teaching art at the King Edward VI Handsworth School for Girls in Birmingham, looking for exhibition opportunities in London, and, taking advantage of her proximity to Italy and the rest of Europe, seeking fresh inspiration for her painting, which focuses on realism and figurative work. Her paintings have appeared in a wide variety of galleries and museums in the Philadelphia region, as well as in Germany and Italy.
Between studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and earning her liberal-arts degree at Penn’s College of General Studies, Finnerty went abroad for five years, traveling around Africa and Europe to paint. “I didn’t want to be locked up in a studio right away,” she says.
After graduating from Penn she taught bilingual physics, biology, and math to middle-school students in Camden. “Science and art are very similar to me,” Finnerty explains. Just as a scientist conducts an experiment, “when you begin to paint and draw, you think you have a result in mind—you have this hypothesis—but you don’t know where you may end up.”
She later taught art at a Philadelphia middle school for three years, and for the last six years has worked in a suburban Pennsylvania high school teaching ceramics, advanced placement and intermediate art, painting and drawing.
During summer breaks Finnerty, her husband, who is also a painter, and their son traveled widely—to Europe, South America, and Mexico. “The Fulbright was a good opportunity to leave the country and go back to live in Europe—not just for the summer,” she says.
She especially wants to return to Italy, where she had lived for three years, and spend more time with Michelangelo. “I’m still absolutely in love with the figure. To this day I’m riveted by his work.” Finnerty works a lot with the nude, though in the finished product her subjects are often clothed. “I really believe when you’re doing art, whether you’re writing, painting or drawing, you have to work from the inside out. You start out with bone, tissue, flesh, then you put on the details at the end.”
