Entropy Liquid Painting

Change has always played an important role in my life. It was my source of hope and survival. I was born in San Tome, Anzoategul, Venezuela. I was but an infant when my father took our young family from the growing turbulence of Venezuela to Mexico City where we were embraced by my mother’s family. He had hoped to find more opportunities and a better way of life for his family there, but his wanderlust and search for a better life took us back to his father’s home in Los Angles, California. It was a difficult move on a young family who spoke no English. With many more moves and a struggle to find a home, we settled in Northern California. In these early years of my life, I felt like a stranger, changing schools often and not developing deep relationships beyond my family. I increasingly spent hours alone drawing. Art became my constant companion and it would become my way of communicating the things I could never put into words. My work has been nonobjective since my studies at CSU at Long Beach. My painting centered on the idea of change, energy, and entropy. In the series, Entropy, I alternately built and destroyed the painting’s surface to the edge of destruction. This approach has shifted recently while experimenting on larger canvases. These large canvases were the turning-point to my new series, “Scapes”. The work is less structured and suggests nonspecific but familiar places. From the first pour and dragging of paint, I create a loose structure. The initial step of pour and drag is minimally manipulated to give directional movement across the canvas. Thereafter the work progresses traditionally with the slow build-up of translucent layers created through a glazing technique. I strive to achieve several depths of movement resulting in a haphazard pattern that is very liquid in its essence, reminiscent of the patterns in nature. These new images I attribute to my reconnection to the land I developed on my long drives to California from Santa Fe, NM.