Life is a journey. Everyone follows a different path, a different road, and the beat of their own drum. Life takes us through good times and bad times. It does not matter who you are and where you come from; you have your own experience. No human being is the same. Although some might go through the same experiences, everyone reacts differently.
"There are moments in our lives, there are moments in the day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in the hope that the arts were invented. Sign-post on the way to what might be. Sign-post toward greater knowledge" - Robert Henri
My work is my journey and I will try to help you understand my path.
"Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand? If only they would realize above all an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to the plenty of other things, which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree." - Picasso
I start this quote because I want you as a viewer to understand that I am not explaining the images, I am sharing the journey. If you look at my work it changes and I work in different ways. I feel that there is no such thing as style and that if there is then it is forever changing. Everything in this world is forever changing. My work changes with me. I work abstract, conceptually and figuratively. I think they are all related and one cannot live without the other.
I started working abstract a few years ago. I think I was trying to deal with certain traumas in my life. I was confused and I needed to make sense of things. I needed to make sense of the images being shown to me by art historians and studio professors. I was regurgitating all of it into my prints. But it did not stop just with art history it began to take different forms. I began to use old images and making collages with them in hopes of reaching a better understanding of who I am and the work I was looking at. These abstract images helped to realize the importance of the small things in life. These small things have become so important in all of my work.
"The twentieth century has produced a world of conflicting visions, intense emotions, and unpredictable events, and the opportunities for grasping the substance of life have faded as the pace of activity has increased. Electronic media shuffle us through a myriad of experiences which would have baffled earlier generations and seem to produce in us a strange isolation from the reality of human history. our heroes fade into mere personality, are consumed and forgotten, and we avidly seek more avenues to express humanity. Reflection is the most difficult of all our activities because we are no longer able to establish relative priorities from the multitude of sensations that engulf us. Times such as these seem to illuminate the classic expressions of eternal truths and great wisdom comes to stand out in the crowd of ordinary maxims." - Vine Deloria Jr., Foreword, Black Elk Speaks
After reading Black Elk Speaks, I changed. I noticed how ignorant we are. I noticed how self-centered I am. As a result all my work changed. I began taking testimonies, not necessarily pertaining to anything. Some people gave me their life story. Some people gave me sob stories. Some gave me poetry. Some gave me songs. But all my pieces began with them. Who they see themselves as. Then, being the visual artist, I placed their stories among my perception of them.
These pieces taught me a great deal about life. They forced the person to sit and reflect on what they have gone through. It obligated me to sit and listen and it revived in me the lost art of conversation. The subject and the artist changed in the process. "Testimonial literature can be compelling and immediate, allowing the reader the sense of hearing directly the voices of those recounting their lives. Because testimonies are words of real individuals, they possess a flesh and blood authenticity lacking in the more abstract data." - Kathleen Logan, Personal Testimonies: Latin American women telling their lives, Latin American Research Review, volume 32, number 1, 1997
"There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual...become clairvoyant. We reach then to reality. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. It is the nature of all people to have these experiences; but in our time and under the conditions of our lives, it is only a rare few who are able to continue in the experience and find expression for it. At such times there is a song going on with us, a song to which we listen. It fills us with surprise, we marvel at it. We would continue to hear it. But few are capable of holding themselves in the state of listening to their own song. Intellectuality steps in and as the song within us is of the utmost sensitiveness, it retires in the presence of the cold, material intellect. It is aristocratic and will not associate itself with the common place...and we fall back and become ordinary selves. Yet we live in the memory of these songs, which in moments of intellectual inadvertence have been possible to us. They are the pinnacle of our experience and it is the desire to express these intimate sensations, this song from within, which motivates the masters of all art." - Robert Henri, Kate Kretz
My work like everything in life is still changing. Now I work more traditional. I try to listen to that song, to that little voice in my head, to the child within me.
"We all have two lives: the real one which was our childhood dream and which we still dream about in adult life, though it is set against a background of fog...and the false one which we experience in our relationship with others: the practical, useful life in which we are finally laid into a coffin. In the other life there are no coffins or no corpses, there are only illustrations from childhood: great colored books which are meant to be looked at, not read...in the other life we are ourselves, in the other one we live: while in this one, we die." - Fernando Pessoa