My paintings are a series of spontaneous, improvised choices, made as I feel and react to relationships within their evolving surfaces. These works depend on form, color, and the tactile realities of paint. As markers of time, these works collect deposits which become their surfaces and layers and evidence of my choices in the studio. I think in terms of looseness versus precision, as well as thickness, flatness, and my desire for colors. I want a whole that’s somehow connected and worked through, one that allows the viewer to find space and can take a sustained gaze.

I am interested in what nourishes the nurturer, and what role I might cultivate in my practice as an artist. My aesthetic is often rooted in autobiography and grapples with the elusive territories of the imagination and memory. My compositions examine an uneasiness and balance simultaneously; feminine figures often bend and reach in gestures of an empathetic connection, revealing solidarity between impassive yet vulnerable forms. Lately, I have been painting on antique cotton feedsack textiles that were previously used for farming and agricultural purposes.

 I paint because playing with the alchemic mechanics of pigments makes me happy. For me, each work is an attempt to provide the viewer with an ineffable experience of the extraordinary, a moment of discovery that offers a special kind of knowledge—one that transcends the limitations of verbal and logical discourse. Aside from painting’s immediate sensual character, to paint is to mimic creation in the theological sense.

 Utilizing the motif of a top-down, cinematic viewpoint, my work looks at scenes of leisure from a hovering perspective. Sometimes the paintings act as large-scale, rectangular still lifes of enigmatic items—such as a rollerblade or a spork—carefully positioned on a field of grass. Witty, wry narratives are suggested through playful yet calculated arrangements; at other times, the paintings are shaped works in the form of a parasol, adopting the size and shape of their referent.

 In my painting practice, I document scenes from my life that carry inexplicable emotional weight. I aim to strike a balance between heaviness and lightness by using the juxtaposition of each extreme to capture the truth of my lived reality. My focus is on how mental health frames and contextualizes our view of the world. With each painting, I create a stylistically abstracted reality that mirrors our own, but whose physical characteristics reflect its emotional context.

 Painting is where I develop sensitivity to the self, the environment, and the overall experience of being present and alive. I rely on form and rhythm to reflect my own familiar feelings of displacement and nostalgia. These ideas are expressed as interlocking forms and color shifts that create dimension and a sense of fullness. The narratives reveal themselves slowly, over time; the shapes advance and recede as they interact with those around them, giving the paintings a sense of movement.

 I have always felt a little off-balance and untethered, like the ground is falling or a breeze could pick me up. I struggle to attend to my home and family. I am overwhelmed, jumpy. The world is moving faster than I am. Perhaps we should give more weight to our actions, no matter how small? The whole of our lives is built of innumerable events, one succeeding another, obtusely influencing the next. In a world full of unknowns, change and impermanence are our only certainties. If I could come to terms with this, would my fear subside?

 I create paintings that express the Mexican American diaspora through folkloric symbolism. I use bold color and dynamic lighting, and combine old word visual motifs with contemporary icons, to turn allegorical figures into representations of immigrants and their experiences and memories. I am interested in what happens when cultural heritage intersects with the incidental effects of assimilation. My work explores the resulting spark of identity that comes from this friction and what happens when we are forced to change.

 I make paintings inspired by themes of isolation, queerness, and world-building. My practice borrows from the visual aesthetics and motifs of science fiction, which has long been a site and space to imagine other ways of being and other possibilities for this world. I am interested in how queer subjects face and share an experience of isolation, and how this can drive acts of world-building. My work depicts isolated figures, singly or in groups, in desert and steppe-like landscapes.

 The figurative work I create is a layered combination of rural aesthetics, queer historical references, inherited ephemera, and personal imagery. Painting allows me to tangibly imagine queer futures while honoring a queer past by permitting these stories to coexist within one plane. As I ruminate on the interplay between these employed elements, I am cementing endangered histories and generating utopias.