Old man putting his way out of a ditch. Print

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 thoughts, which she has learned to dip into through repetition and physical and mental calibration: “You can’t control what you are doing, and you don’t know where you are going, but you just do it again and again until the knowledge is in the muscles and the bones, not the brain. The brain has better things to do; no time for instruction—only vision!” Alonso’s main influences can be seen plainly in her work: Willem DeKooning in her use of charcoal and blending of unconventional materials, as well as his idea of a “slipping glimpser”, and Cecily Brown in her fractured brushstrokes. Other influences include painters Joan Mitchell and Larry Poons; illustrator Ralph Steadman; and musicians such as Beck, Nick Cave, and David Berman. Despite her proclivity for art at a young age, Alonso had relatively few interactions with art in her childhood and adolescence. Her parents were not interested in art and favored more practical professional pursuits. But she remembers the moment that the creative world opened up to her, when she found a painting left behind by the previous owner in the garage of her childhood home.