Educating Young Artist

Capturing Chaos In My Artwork

Panic and art seem to go hand in hand for me. In many ways, I believe you cannot have one without the other and it is this distinct tango I hope to teach young artists throughout my career. I hope to impress upon my students a sense of fearlessness and a desire to gaze into the unknown and rather than being overwhelmed by it, they embrace it.

Understanding

The chaos of nature is a subject I have recently been captured by. Using gouache and a lazy afternoon I had the delightful opportunity to attempt to capture pieces of the overgrown backlands of my family home. In looking for structure I was met with more abstraction, a repetition of shapes and chaos that at first glance felt untamable. It was not until I gave myself up to the chaos and allowed the lack of simple structure to be my guide through the brush. Finding this peace opened my eyes to the joy of natural painting and abstract landscape work. Finding myself within the repetitive yet flowing motion of leaves and branches gave a sort of grounded meditation for me to think of my own artistic process.

Loneliness

Loneliness is a common theme in my work. Exploring loneliness and the painful quiet of being amongst many yet feeling more alone than ever is a concept I often revisit. Growing up in a Hispanic family and not learning the language until my teenage years I understood this concept very well. Being foreign and familiar all at the same time, of being so well known, yet so misunderstood on a basic level provided me with a very specific perspective that I bring into my work. In many ways my artistic mission is to finally describe my feelings as I have felt them, to take these complicated and abstract emotions to the page and release them in a way that someone may someday say “I understand.”