My eyes are wide open in search of signals to culture & strength. Art is for thinking; it is for trying to get at life, to guess at the meaning of it and find a connection. I am drawn to Culture and Strength as I believe these qualities are vital to moving onward. It is for this reason that I must do my work as Culture is too beautiful not to be regarded with sincerity.
I often depict images that I see in my own community of San Antonio and the South Texas region. While I am a proud Mexican-American person, I was raised within an arm’s length of what I would consider to be deep Hispanic/Latinx culture. I feel I have a unique appreciation and perspective of it, I am a fortunate voyeur of it, and I am endlessly delighted to witness examples of it. I feel a sense of duty to do each image justice through my work and release it back to the community.
A utility of art is to slow down our vision, to be able to look at life as it occurs to each of us and reflect upon it. I process the world in layers, and so I paint in layers beginning with a deep foundational hue and, over time, building on to that and refining each layer. As I apply the paint, I combine what I see in the real world with what it means to me. This results in a jeopardizing of reality as I use saturated color, exaggerated form and increased vibrancy. My work can only represent how I see the world, using my particular pictorial language.