Erika Alonso

Erika Alonso (b. 1987) is a Cuban-American painter, working and living in Houston, Texas. Her childhood was spent in Southern California, and the ephemeral beauty of its coastal sunsets is a place she often “escapes” to while painting. Alonso is a self-taught artist and an unabashedly painterly painter. Her current makings involve experimenting in abstract expressionism through a series of whimsical, abstract-figurative-landscape paintings that are meant to capture a moment in all of its fleetingness—the movement and rush and whirl of it.

The artist describes her work as an escape from reality: “My paintings are just places I’d like to spend my time. Places that are pleasantly stimulating, enchanting, complex, and consistently inconsistent.”

And in a way, they are where the artist spends most of her time—painting in her studio at Winter Street. Alonso likens her painting process to daydreaming, and the painting itself to a vessel through which the viewer can travel into the snapshots in her mind. Her faith in the process comes across in her use of color with abandon, which the artist attributes to her confidence that the act of painting is something that is driven by the still place just below the surface of her conscious tho...