"Three Children" Drawing

I love silence. I have traveled through this world as a visual occupant. From the very beginning, my voice felt inaudible—for many reasons: my heritage, my place as a woman in my family, and my own struggle to reconcile words with their contradictions and failures. Recently, I listened to Dominican writer Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, speak about how many people—especially immigrants—“miss parts of most conversations for lack of comprehension.” I recognized myself completely in that description. It was the terrain I had inhabited for so long. And in that quiet space of partial understanding, I found myself reaching toward a language both simple and universal. My earliest images were primitive, unrefined, and utterly my own. At age eight, I drew worlds filled with people laughing, dancing, and delighting in one another—a diary of innocence. By eighteen, I turned to portraits as the realities of the world began pressing into that young, protected space. “Art plays an unknowing game with things. Just as a child at play imitates us, so we at play imitate the forces that created and are creating the world.” —Paul Klee I continued drawing portraits, but I did not discover my true voice until I was twenty-nine, when I began what would later be called my signature black-and-white style. It emerged intuitively—born of economy, of limited tools and limited time—but quickly revealed a life of its own. My skill in drawing was present, but something deeper pulled me: a profound attraction to simplicity and to the generative imperfections of the process. Black and white felt honest. It mirrored my own need for clarity and my acceptance of flaw. It felt like an antidote to the growing presence of technology—still in its early forms in the ’80s—a presence I sensed I could never compete with. I understood then, and know even more now, that authenticity is rarely efficient, rarely convenient, never politically correct. What it is, however, is true