A brief
history of the Artist
Edi Oliveira Merez was
born in southern Bahia, graduated in administration, though her talents for
visual arts was always present. Edi has painted oil paintings, made pottery, restoration
of old furniture, wooden handcrafted goods, and finally her true passion, miniatures.
The interest for miniatures came naturally, and gained
more emphasis when her family got involved in the universe of orchidophilia. By
visiting exhibitions with her husband and children, she had the opportunity to
meet people from orchidist universe, exchange important information, make great
friendships. Participated in the organization of a meeting of orchid growers,
and produced some miniature orchids to be distributed among the participants of
the event. From there, several orders began to emerge and Edi decided to
dedicate to creating products related to the world of orchidophilia
How are the orchids made
Each miniature is made indiviually; being a artistic
work, it can’t be made in large scale, and just as in nature, there won’t be
two identical pieces.
All the component parts of the plant are made
separately, first the petals, then the sepals, the lip, the roots, the
pseudobulbs, the leaves, the spathe and the roots, and then the artist unites
these parts with a special glue and puts it in a vase with substrate. For the
confection of these parts, the artist develops its own tools, which may vary
according to the species represented, meaning that the tools used to make a
Paphiopedilum, for example, are totally different from those used to make a
Cattleya. Furthermore, after the tools, manually molded adjustments are
necessary. After that, it starts the manual painting.
The painting seeks to ensure details such as mosses
that form in the vase, the subtleties of variation of the green tones on the
leaves (usually sprouts have a lighter shade of green than the older leaves),
the straws that form around the pseudobulbs among other important details. In
particular, the lip paint requires more care and attention, first by the
difficulties imposed by the small size and second the need to achieve as much similarity
as possible, considering the factor that this part is the one that resembles
the original plant.
Greenhouse project