But You Don’t Look Mexican: Embracing Not Fitting Into a Box
Recently I had a breakthrough! I’ve been on a journey of trying to decipher my style as an artist. There is so much pressure on defining one’s style. Which I agree to, but to a certain extent.
The meaning behind my work—all my work, be it painting, writing, performance, etc is the journey of resilience and remembering our soul’s purpose.
My paintings are very layered, both in the application of paint but also physically layered. This was the discovery today. I don’t simply make individual paintings. They’re a part of a collective that are meant to be experienced together in clusters. Very much like the series I’m working on right now. I think this is heart of my artist’s journey—the PAST LIVES series and I will create and recreate variations of this for the rest of my life..
I’ve had a vision of an installation consisting of several paintings spread out on the floor—raw paintings on canvas side-by-side surrounded by clusters of paintings on the walls.
They represent us. We are all living in these little universes of past lives, past experiences, hopes and dreams evolving in our own little solar system surrounded by others just the same.
It’s funny. I didn’t realize what I was working toward until I compared some photos of my recent work side by side with a photo I took of all my paintings spread out on the floor. There was this desire in me to show these just like that—spread out on the floor, to be observed in a way like walking on a journey. I felt that very strongly but didn’t know how to make that happen or how it actually connected with everything else.
But that’s just it. I sometimes forget that I am bi-racial. Never really fitting into a designed “box’ in society, I became accustomed to not identifying with anything. People would often ask me (and still do) , “What are you?” As a child I found that very painful to have to explain my appearance to them. This was difficult for me and I never felt like I fit into a style, a culture or could identify with either side of my heritage both culturally and physically though my appearance. When I explained that my mother is white and my father is Mexican-American I would be met with , “You don’t look Mexican.”
My mom’s family is of French/Swiss decent in he US for a few generations, while my father, a first generation American, was combination of both indigenous people of Mexico and descendants of Spain. I never felt fully a part of one culture. I ended up feeling like I existed in my own little world that was sort of an experiment of being someone that others around me were not. I think only someone that are up like this could fully understand this.
With my art I find it confining to try and confirm to a particular style. While I don’t see my style as extremely varied from painting to painting, I do think they all look different; yet they look like they belong together.
When I see them clustered together I see myself.
This is why I connect strongly with the concept of past lives, in that we have all lived many lives, come from many cultures, experienced different classes, varied ethic backgrounds, genders and variations of our true selves. This is where I find my connection to others. We are all just humans getting a chance to live a dream that was planted long, long ago.
