This year, I’ve been working in a generous friend’s guest house with floor-to-ceiling windows set in a leafy garden where I have been making large-scale watercolor paintings as part of a series titled Dreamwalking in the Tender Garden/ Soñar despierta In this series, I use the seemingly elemental simplicity of watercolor to articulate notions of my ancestral maternal heritage and to underscore our forgotten connection with the natural and cosmic worlds. These artworks emerge from within me through a lyrical and intuitive approach. Each one aims to be a pilgrimage towards rediscovery, a search to return to the essence of home, and, simultaneously, symbolize the ideas and feelings I have developed over time.  Here I am with I am a drop (Amor Vacui), 2024 Watercolor on Arches cotton paper 78.75 x 51.25 inches $8,700 I’m a regular lap swimmer, and at the end of a swim, I’m always in the mood to linger with a twist or spin underwater. It makes me think of our aquatic cousins and how familiar their movements feel in my body. And that has gotten me thinking about how we know what we know and how we unlearn those things. I’ve been curious about epigenetics and wondering if we can have intergenerational trauma, could we not also hold distant happy memories? There are things we call instincts. Maternal instincts come to mind, as do the thoughts of young children with their hearts full of empathy and love for other animals. This is where my work has been taking me these days. As you may also know, I am the daughter of a Mexican mother and a white father from the USA. My late mother’s family is mestiza, which is the term for people who are a mix of Indigenous and European ancestry popularized in early colonial Mexico. I have found myself returning to spirituality and exploring the beliefs of ancient Mesoamericas. What I am learning is that, at their core, there are many similarities in the worldviews of the original people throughout the Americans. Those worldviews embrace intuition and feeling and include engaging spiritually with other beings, the world, and the universe. Embracing this can mean living with more awe and wonder in the great mystery of life, which I find very appealing.  Winged Soul, 2024 Watercolor on Arches cotton paper 51.25 x 37.5 inches $6,340 Butterflies are symbols of renewal, change, magical transformation, and of lost souls in many cultures, including pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican. Their forms change from caterpillar into a chrysalis where they emerge as a beautiful butterfly. They cross borders and worlds. Do their lives continue transforming to carry the souls of the departed, as my mother said? Entertaining this recalls a quote by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa: “Magic is the total delight (appreciation) of chance.” So, it seems we know things and then we unlearn a lot as we grow older. We lose our wonder and awe for the world around us and each other. Or, perhaps more accurately, we bury them with notions of what we ironically think of as the “real world.” With definitions, dogmas, and ideologies that humans have invented and have papered over our understanding of the world—the names of nation-states and their boundaries, brands, titles, and all other signifiers that keep us from seeing ourselves and each other for who we are and how we exist in relation to other beings, the earth, and the universe.
It is as if we are so busy being rational that we hardly feel. Are we, perhaps, missing half the fun of being on this beautiful earth? Like our antenna is broken, and we don’t sense the energetic vibrations from life all around us to sound woo-woo, but I think there is some truth in it. So, I’ve been going inward and brushing away the veils we’ve laid over our consciousness to connect with what I sense. And I’m trying to rebalance rational thinking with intuitive feeling. I’ve enjoyed immersing myself in these thoughts and creating these worlds in my artworks. I hope that they help awaken unseen connections for you and enrich your life as well. Happy New Year! I hope you're doing well and are ready to begin anew. I wanted to share a mini-series I made at the end of 2023 (images below). Exhibiting my botanicals last fall got me thinking again about our complicated relationship with nature (and ourselves). While most of my botanicals are an explosion of color, in these new works I depict botanicals minimally⏤they are botanicals in essence only. Here, the botanicals are blackened and remind me that everything has a dark side⏤even bright colorful flowers. This darkness and mystery is part of what makes the beauty within all of us. In the Jungian sense of Shadow Integration, our shadow is the unconscious and denied part of ourselves. Working to understand our shadows can help us integrate all parts of ourselves and bring them to light. Also, I’m honored to share that I’ve been selected as an Aesthetica Art Prize 2024 Longlisted Artist based on my overall practice and my Corazones Cosidos project. Hosted by Aesthetica Magazine (based in the UK), the Aesthetica Art Prize celebrates excellence in art worldwide. It offers both emerging and established artists the opportunity to showcase their work to a wider audience and further their engagement with the international art world.   I’ve been listening to the podcast All There Is with Anderson Cooper about grief. And in a strange way, it’s helped me understand a project, which I recently finished. Cooper points out that grief and sadness link us all—that they are part of the human condition. In fact, nearly everyone has or will experience something that brings profound grief. We might not know about the losses each other is experiencing or feel we should acknowledge them, in part, because as a society we have moved away from rituals that allow us to process grief and loss together.
In 2005, I experienced a series of tragic losses. It was overwhelmingly disorienting. The many dimensions of grief washed over me for years gradually fading in intensity and frequency until those losses became part of who I am on some level. In the mysterious ways that ideas for artworks come to me, I found myself many years later, processing that terrible year, other losses, and wounds and trying to capture a metaphorical “repair” of myself through artistic rituals and performance actions that I recorded on video and with photographs. Dressed in a cloak of mourning in beautiful landscapes, I think I was trying to convey and remind myself that there is sadness but also beauty in the world. In my project, Corazones Cosidos, I use thread made of gold to mend 30 hearts on paper that I pierced with arrows. Part of my impulse for making so many hearts is to show how we all have our constellation of wounds and how in reality they are one of the things that connect us.  I thought we all might like something fresh for our walls this year, so I created this new media series. I’ve also been reflecting on our relationship to nature. After being stuck in a flat in Madrid for all of spring, and then returning to enjoy California’s beautiful beaches and parks just when the most horrific wild fire season began reminded me of the urgency of this relationship. For me, this artwork holds two somewhat conflicting ideas simultaneously: a celebration the sheer beauty of nature and on our attempt to control it. With images of flowers as a sort of allegory for the natural world, these artworks pose the question of how our actions alter or repair the living world. Digitally generated limited editions, these artworks are made with archival pigment prints on textured, 340 gsm thick, cotton paper (think watercolor paper). I’m offering some editions in larger print runs to keep the prices very reasonable. Others are limited editions of one and include details in oil and gold added by hand over the pigment print. All pieces are numbered and signed on the back and come with a Certificate of Authenticity. (Let me know if you see something you want but need a larger size.)  |
