After arriving in Austin, settling down after all the travels and having my very own art studio that I adore, I've been experimenting with a variety of art styles in search of "the one" on which I want to focus my energies.
This journey took a quite interesting and unexpected turn.
Nature's shapes, colors, and textures serve as a significant source of inspiration for my paintings. Lately, I felt compelled to play with florals and to be less scared to use color in my art. That's all part of a bigger quest to reconnect with both my feminine and spiritual sides.
That's when I came across a Youtube video of someone making piping flowers on a cupcake. That really fascinated me and made me want to experiment with using that approach to create textured flowers for my art.
Up until now, I've felt like I've been creating art with a masculine mindset, frightened of making mistakes, mixing colors, and always wanting to make sense of a painting through reasoning.
I believe that I know what influenced me to approach my art in that manner. Going back in time, I was about 7 or 8 years old when my father taught me what he knew about drawing.
My dad was quite skilled at drawing graphite portraits. He had an innate talent, and also supplemented it with correspondence classes, as in classes that were sent via postal mail (we're talking about the 80s here). What my dad taught me were techniques that would result on a very precise drawing, since what he liked doing was portraits. Everything was measured, copied, and photographically replicated. My dad told me in many occasions that abstract art wasn't "real art" in his eyes; and that true art was a faithful representation of reality. Even though my dad never thought that he could be a professional artist (also something that he unfortunately taught me), I believe that he had enough talent to be one had he dedicated his career to that.
On my mom's side of the family, my uncle was an intriguing character to me. He was very intelligent. An avid reader, every year the City Library would give a prize to the most frequent reader, and every year he was the winner. He was a self taught guitar player, sculptor, painter and poet. I always felt the wish to just sit down and get to know him. But his struggles with mental health and addiction just made it impossible for me to ever try to unravel the riddle that was my mom's brother.
Whenever I doubt my creative nature and need some type of validation on the reason why I became an artist, I think about these two men (my dad and my uncle), in hope that going through my family history would help me understand who I am and why I create art.
Now that I find myself experimenting with using a piping bag, I noticed that there was something oddly familiar with that practice. It's a liberating experience where beautiful shapes, colors, textures just appear before my eyes as if by magic. And seeing what I'm creating makes my eyes (not only my brain) happy.
That's when it hit me.
Suddenly I had a realization: my dad and my uncle aren't the only reference of artists in my family!
My grandma (my dad's mom) was an excellent baker. She was famous for her incredibly delicious cakes. She began working at a bakery, and later worked independently from home. Her cakes were so wonderful, that people from far used to come to order them. As she was getting busier with the demand, she needed a helper. And who was the person that she hired to help her? My mom.
So growing up I was constantly surrounded by cakes, and frostings and sweet fillings. I watched everyday as my grandma and my mom decorated cakes using piping bags. I even tried my hand at it in several occasions.
The question that I've been asking myself now is: why have I never regarded the women in my family as artistic when in reality they were the ones that were creating everyday and profiting from their creations?
I don't yet have an answer to that question, and am not sure I need one. What matters is that my journey to find an art style that I love has been a surprising one.
Realizing that my art practice has brought me closer to the women that came before me in my family has warmed my heart and made me admire them even more.
Living far away from home really requires a huge amount of self-awareness, or you risk losing touch with who you truly are. But that is a topic for a future post...
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