Where It All Started

FROM THE BEGINNING

The inferno of a horrific auto accident took the lives of my closest friends the same afternoon my wife and I were dancing in celebration at our brother’s wedding reception. I have lived through a decade of unexpectedly losing numerous family members and dear friends while experiencing the joy of raising a family of four children. I paint loved ones on life support systems to process and make sense of our suffering. Watercolor is fragile and often uncontrollable, so I take control by repainting the puddles as solidified structures in large scale acrylic and oil paintings. We cannot entirely make sense or extract meaning from near-death situations; there is always a tension between the depiction and our own mortality. I confront this by engaging with patients of intensive care units who are unseen and quarantined from the public.

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My painting process is one of my strategies for processing the pain of those suffering around us and the loss felt when they are gone. The entire enterprise of the artist is a metaphor in its function and its structure – to produce an authentically therapeutic experience and the process it takes to achieve it. When rendering the small watercolor sketches, I am often soaking or injecting to put the image more out-of-control and forcing myself to act quickly by blotting, erasing, and excavating as I’m trying to keep the image alive. Using razor blades and cutting the surface is analogous to surgical cuts in my attempt to resurrect a portrait.

THE NEXT STEPS

The next steps in my process include projecting the watercolor, which is a method for uncompressing the complexity of the sketch to a large canvas so I can see the detailed relationships between marks. If painting is a model for how we think, then magnifying it is an investigation into how thoughts are made and connected. I begin to unpack this visual information by tinting the primer/gesso with nuanced color in acrylics as a painted map for the following layers. Dressed in a hazmat suit like those worn by healthcare workers during the recent pandemic, I then spray the white primer as a translucent veil. This step is not only an aestheticization of the outbreak, but also creates an atmosphere of light similar to retinal overexposure when waking up from surgery.

My final step is to work with the canvas horizontally and flood the surface with water-soluble oil paint. Dilution results in a fugitive quality that I intend to preserve and amplify in the large paintings. Together with employing traditional brushes, I utilize recalibrated medical equipment as tools for blowing, vacuuming, wiping, stamping, and injecting the paint. Working quickly at this stage, I feel an urgency of gaining control like an ER situation where the patient could die if I make the wrong move.

The most vulnerable of our population in Texas during the coronavirus pandemic were Hispanics, accounting for half of the fatalities in our state. In some rural areas, the demographics of Latinos and Black Hispanics make up the majority of people with many on ventilators and life-support systems. Patients were essentially taken away from their families to a hospital room with little or no contact to the outside world. What I evoke in the paintings is in-part from the healthcare point-of-view of reassuring the patient and simply being there for them.