The Nature of My Nature; A Story About Relationships

Abstract As a second generation Hispanic, I am a painter whose work is informed by my personal experience of displacement and longing to belong. In turn, I hope, this longing inspires an important dialogue about place, memory, otherness and belonging. I work in small, intimate scale, evoking narratives of vastness yet also of solitude. The landscape and the natural environment I represent, become populated by anonymous creatures. Both animal and human, posed in semi-natural and semi-artificial settings. I was born in Texas and grew up in Missouri. The images I produce are often tranquil and surreal yet are grounded through their inherent familiarity. My use of paint serves as a language that transforms poetry into visual art. I use poetic approach to reflect upon the so-called natural world. Frequently, I relate and even exchange, animals and humans in my paintings. I propose narratives, which express the problematic relationship society has with the natural world. My paintings provide an invented landscape that acts as a metaphor for beings who have been displaced or uprooted from their original environments. The characters and beings that appear in my work symbolize marginalization. Through ironic humor and understated theatricality my work points at the similarities all biological life shares. The habitats I portray are often unknown and artificial, reflecting notions of absence and melancholia. My work is often underscored by the unavoidable, anthropomorphist approach yet it offers metamorphic shifts. My paintings re-contextualize the unfamiliarity of subjects, to draw attention to connections. I emphasize those relationships in my paintings because I believe that the respect of animals would lead to a more empathetic society