Who Am I?
Roxana Ené was born in 1962 in Bucharest, Romania. She left her home country in 1982 and resided for many years abroad – Greece (Athens) and USA (Hartford, Connecticut) before finally settling in 1991 in the region of Main-Taunus, near Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She attended various art courses and developed her artistic skills in painting, drawing, hand lettering, embossing and creative writing. She won over the years different art prizes and awards as a visual artist including in the category photography. Starting 1996 the artist developed her own calligraphic writing (ROXYGRAPHY) which has become a major compositional element in most of Roxana´s artworks. In 2007 she started working on her unique concept ROXY & KIDS ART, an innovative form of collaborative art with and for children, based on metamorphosis and synesthesia and having an important therapeutic effect. In 2010 Roxana joined forces with her talented son Alexander Ené (illustrator) and Chris Silberer, German copywriter, conceptionist and author. Together they initiated a series of award winning collaborative ROXY&KIDS ART projects with and for children in daycare centers, kindergartens, schools and child help non-profit organizations and foundations in Germany and Romania (Tabaluga Foundation, Peter Maffay Foundation, Hope & Homes for Children, Defeat Autism, Save the Children, Hospice-House of Hope and Help Autism). “Queen Kira” – one of the ROXY & KIDS ART co-works entered in 2013 the Royal Collection (The Royal Collection is the art collection of the British Royal Family and the largest private art collection in the world).
In 2015 the Romanian Administration of the National Cultural Fund co-financed the ROXY & KIDS ART book project “DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE?”, a book for children, young people (with and without special needs) and teachers but also for any other passionate or curious to discover all sorts of beings and stories in any blot of paint.
Cosmina Dragomir, author of the preface, explains in a different way the intentions of the book; ergo she also explains the intentions of the ROXY & KIDS ART project:
“Facts are ordinary: children have painted the paper, and Roxana saw them and understood them. Or differently: children played in the paradise of colours, and Roxana travelled to their place. Being afraid to lose the remembrance of her own landing, before the torrid afternoons will huddle upon us, she thought to put together her traces in a manuscript. She found a solution, the treasure-chest-book. Or better the deluxe book. Do you happen to know what a deluxe book really means? Not a book that costs a lot, as you might think, but a book that captures light (lux). Indeed, this book is capturing light – the light of a heaven so close to us, a heaven that we ignore each day, pretending that we do not see it. The heaven of the mind, the one that belongs to our thoughts risen above, and set aside on a shelf at God Himself. An immaterial and abstract paradise, that smells wonderful, clean, whole, colored in distinctive but incomprehensible tones, a heaven of emotions and words that are so strange to us. Big people from our world are identifying this heaven, its code and its communication as ART. Though I doubt it. I think it is a lot more than mere art. This book is an adventure movie: Roxana has set out on a quest for the smallest artistic creatures of this universe, and she nestled a while amongst them, she played with them, she changed their fingers into brushes and their arms into wings. She was only left with the delight. The excitement of “I’ve been there”. And she’s offering this to us, as a most precious gift. Her book is allowing us to play a little longer with these small inhabitants of the real fairytale, some of them living unknown, without a loving touch, curled up next to us.”