-Duality 01-
How do you process an immeasurable loss? How do you navigate through the opposites of gratefulness and anger? How do you sit in peace with what you can’t change? How can you feel deeply rooted in your culture while an ocean away?
For the past ten years, I’ve been pushed to my limits trying to figure out these questions. Right now, I’m at a point where I have enough mental peace and tools to sit down with all of those emotions and figure them out. Taking the teachings of one great David Lynch, I have grabbed a seed -an idea- and have been nurturing it with references, meditation, and self-reflection.
This is the first in a series of paintings I will be working on, trying to figure out how to live with the duality of loss and gratefulness, of anger and love, and of a deep feeling of cultural identity while being an immigrant.
Duality 01 is, for me, a promise to myself. A promise to never let that childlike spark die.
Visually inspired by the works of Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Kati Horna, and spiritually fed by grief. But this grief is not for the people I’ve lost, at least not at its core. It’s the grief of the years lost in a deep depression, dealing with PTSD and grieving the loss of that life I thought I wanted and I was working so hard towards. And of course, the grief of the acknowledgment that I am a different person from the one I was on track to become. I’ll never meet that person… and for that… I’m very grateful.
That’s the part of the duality that has me scratching my head and heart. And this is the only way I can fully express that.
Accepting that a part of me has been changed and most likely will remain hardened by experience, while at the same time I refuse to let that harden my childlike core. The only remedy I can find is for them to play the roles they are meant to. The hard structure of caution and vigilance (any therapists reading, please unclench) will serve as the foundation for where the playful inner kid will swing wildly and shine as bright as it always has.
Close-ups and sketches
La niña chispa
Colour test
Original sketch
La criatura