BP Oil Spill Painting

The foundation of my work can be traced to my early childhood. My work is the result of the need to express my cheerful, humorous, sarcastic, extroverted personality typical of Caribbean coast where I was born in Colombia. Because of health issues (among them asthma) I discovered that working with acrylics did not seem to affect me in a negative way, so I use it in combination with several different techniches always looking for minutiae details and an aesthetic quality evoking the Northern Renaissance. What intrigue me the most were the issues related to the ecosystem and the damage that has been done to it. These ideas and issues came by as the result of the education I was given to by the schools and government institutions in Colombia. I participated in competitions where I received numerous award and encouragement to pursued my artistic vision I grew up surrounded by violence, war, drug trafficking, the native looting, excessive craving for power, social injustice, ecclesiastical corruption. The culmination of all of these issues was the assassination of my father. All of these issues created a particular perception of reality for me, and my artistic approach to those became the force that allowed me to grow and create beyond the hardships of my early development years. As an escape I moved to the United States and started a creative process from all of my personal experiences, complicated and problematic to address that profoundly affects our environment; integrated all in a visual approach using everyday items and toys, which have been discarded. I adopt and give them participation in my work reinterpreting the meaning and again they take strength thus representing a problem that affects our lives and our society. My purpose is to mark a point in history, manage and communicate with a modern language to convey my thoughts and feelings, through an iconographic symbolism with which the viewer is connected, amused, ponders and finally gets involved in the search for solutions.