Carving

We are all born artists. We all draw and paint as kids. We are all quite good at it. Some of us just don’t stop. I am a painter, and after facing blank canvases for more than 20 years, I have come to believe that whatever we do in this world, we are all the artists of our own lives. Our blank canvases are the hours of our days, our paints are our thoughts and feelings, and our energy is our inspiration. How we express it, is up to us.

I’m a Latin American artist implanted in New York City. I was born in the Dominican Republic. My family immigrated to NYC when I was 12 years old. We moved to the South Bronx, where I grew up. The difference in environments provided new directions for my art. At a very early stage in my childhood I began drawing unceasingly and obsessively. I heard someone say drawing is the foundation of painting. I say a great drawing is the foundation to a masterpiece.

Art has always been part of my life. From the days of drawing on my mother’s walls to the oils on canvas I create, to date, one thing is constant, the drive to create new windows to allow anyone who’s interested a glimpse of what I can only see in my mind. My favorite thing to do as a boy was making figures out of paper and then imagining they were real people. Being an artist is about imagining new possibilities and creating new realities. I believe that the nature of tomorrow's reality, balanced as it is on the fulcrum of today, will depend on whether or not each of us responds artfully and creatively to the challenges which face us. I believe that the more we exercise our personal and social artistry, the more likely it is that we will enjoy a fully realized future.

The accessibility to the city’s museums provided me with a new glimpse to new and classical art. As a citizen of the ghetto of New York in the mid 80’s, I needed a place to escape the streets and crime. I became very familiar with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The MOMA and The Guggenheim: these were my refuge. There I was influenced by a wide range of great but very different artists. Artists such as Geronimus Bosh, Dali, Vermeer, Pieter Bruegel, Caravaggio, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, John William Waterhouse , Max Ernst, Maxfield Parish among others. Their paintings and drawings of fantastic realms of other realities captured my imagination and laid my foundation as an artist. I think in art as in society we have to look at the past to create a better future.

At the age of 18, I began documenting my dreams by drawing or writing them. My paintings are based on my Buddhist beliefs( principally on the emptiness of inherent existence) and combinations of dreams. I believe dreams are a true manifestation of the human psyche. We may not understand them right away but they are a window of information about ourselves. This provides an endless supply of ideas and fields to explore that are both conscious and subconscious. My medium of preference is oils and digital. However, I believe mediums become secondary so long as my art shows and captures detail of energy and it lifts the imagination in a manner that is both whimsical and seductive, representing fantasies, formally and literally, providing dramatic intensity and insight into the subliminal dimensions of the psyche; thus achieving poignancy through a unique and captivating perspective that resonates throughout my work.