Once again, the work has taken a turn—into a new series of colorful expressionist pieces. Throughout more than forty years of creating, I have rarely stayed in one lane. Galleries often encourage artists to find a niche and repeat what sells. I have never been comfortable with that. Landscape painting brought my greatest commercial success, yet I have continually wandered into new territories: abstraction, mixed-media, and even my HangUps series with faces suspended on clotheslines. With our move in 2019 to Oaxaca, Mexico, a group of paintings emerged from our Dos Venados studio: Memento Mori paintings of symbolic skeletons, honoring the Dia de Muertos motif.
Reinvention keeps the work alive.
Antes del Nombre, Oil on canvas, 70 x 80 cm
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| Fauve Mujer, Oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm |
I lay down color and motion without a plan, letting the paint lead. After that foundation is alive on the canvas, I look for what wants to emerge. In the first two paintings, that became luminous female portraits. I created them first using AI as a reference, then translated and transformed them in paint over the loose, expressive ground. They are larger than life, born from imagination and guided by technology, yet made human by the hand.
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| Sandia, Oil on canvas, 25 x 25 cm |
Today, I shifted scale. Once the abstract background had dried, I set up a simple still life of a slice of watermelon on a plate. Working from a familiar, realistic subject sparked a different energy. A dialogue unfolded between the bold underpainting and the object before me. In the end, both voices found harmony: the grounded and the mysterious, the seen and the unforeseen.
The pleasure lies in not knowing exactly where the next brushstroke will lead. That is the freedom I have always trusted.
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