Studio Update • 02/11/2024

What is your favorite dream?

Who were you then?

What is your favorite dream? Who were you then?

A week of (in)taking everything all at once

Hi, you out there, or hello to me in the future. Another week has gone by and it went quickly, and what has changed in seven days?

Studio work:

I finished a painting + started a new painting this week. I am at odds with myself on how to determine when paintings are done. Of course, as they say, a piece of artwork is never complete, but at some point, there is this feeling inside my belly + heart + mind that tells me to stop. This week I had that moment when looking at the green dog staring back at me in my painting. I haven’t come up with a title for it yet, but something along the lines of Washed in the Blood of Dog or Los Perros Me Dijeron Algo (The Dogs Told Me Something).

The new painting is in its early stages, and I’m not sure if I’m too happy with it. As I am new(ish) to this painting thing, I’m uncertain as to what my visual language is. The current shape these paintings rest in are large figures and dogs taking up the composition of the work. In this new work, the underpainting is more open, and the figures are not as much the focal point anymore, but I’m more interested in capturing a specific moment. It’s based on a memory of my mother’s, but a question I have for you to think about is how is it different to relive someone else’s moment/memory. Is it different than revisiting/remembering/reviving your own memory? If you want to know my answer, in short, it is. I’m hoping to make drastic progress on it this week and will continue to revisit this question, and maybe by next week, my answer will change.


Thoughts/Dreams/Other:

This week I have been thinking about — family, my mother, dogs, my spine, the act of cradling, shadows, cyclical patterns, birds, shared struggle, hands, blurring, and overlapping objects.

I’d like to recount a dream for you. I was on my grandmother’s porch it is cement with 3 steps that leads to a walkway. Across the street is a very small factory (if that) and they have a parking lot that has a fence. In my dream, there was a dog behind the shiny silver fence and it was gnashing. I couldn’t figure out what it was upset about and then I saw a hawk swoop in and it stood in front of the fence. The dog somehow phased through the fence and attacked the hawk, and phased back through the fence where it was enclosed. I collected the hawk and held it close and quickly it recovered. I was sure it was dead, but it returned to the fence where this time I had noticed that the dog was protecting its child (a puppy). The puppy escaped and the hawk killed it and then following killed the mother/father. The hawk proceeded to turn its gaze to me and attacked me. The dream was overexposed and sunny I hadn’t seen my grandmother’s yard so bright before.

I’ve been trying to figure out what it means but I want it to come to me when it is ready.