Artist Statement

The short of it:

I’m hyper-observant, obsessive for context and reading between the lines in senses both visual and literal. I use color as an environment for ideas and themes. I am hedonistic and a sensualist. Queer. Fun. Interdisciplinary. Liminal in my approach to discovering, making, and in thinking.

The long of it:

It is the halo, the glow, and my proprioceptive way of experiencing the vibe of people and places that drives me to express myself through painting, printmaking, jewelry, and interior design. Beyond form or mass, beyond geometry and structure, I am interested and sustained by physically realizing in art the off-gassing of essential themes and symbols.

In my practice, I live to explore ways of making the immaterial, conceptual vapor that surrounds real things… visible. I feel too deeply most days, observing and reacting to the world entirely between the lines of the mundane and the sublime. I believe the word is “liminal”. And that is because I am a liminal person, existing as a fully queer and half Puerto Rican gender non conforming person. I continuously relish in my place of otherness and enjoy discovering first the language and then the symbol that best depicts my felt experience.

It is my hope, and my craft, to connect this with the universality of human experience beyond the list of things that I am, divested from my own identity, history and future. I desire people to react to my earnest attempt at expression in whatever way brings them emotional joy and aesthetic empowerment. That my meditations and hallucinations can inspire others to explore the inbetweenism of ideas, places, and people. Think and feel as you wish, but know that my creative output is given with the love and light meant to encourage every viewer to find more energy vs. less over time by experiencing and considering what lies betwixt and bewitching underneath, alongside, above, and within substance and form.

Before starting to make anything, I often start with ideation and literal statements on the basis of memories, both won and lost expectations, lust, expressions of vanity, experiences, abstract concepts, poetry, fragments of language as well as travels both near and far.

Keywords/Interests/Influences:

Netherlands, Queer Art, Diversity & Inclusion, Creativity as Problem Solving, Gold Jewelry, More is More, Tony Duquette as a Lifestyle, Table Scaping, Champagne, Patti Labelle, Craftsmanship, Mirroring Lifestyles and Spaces, Enchiladas, Multiple Prints, Printmaking, Hockney, Dine, Rauschenberg, Personal and Self-Empowered Aesthetic Choices, Plants in the Home, Saabs, Details.