Art Is Life. I Want to Live.

For quite a while now my art tackled, displacement, separation of family, the father wound, inner child and the shadow. Then my mother dies and I was like -Fuck, now what... I began to dive in the incomprehensible void and naked aloneness, but halfway into it, after a series of dreams with my mother, where she advises and is doing okay, I stopped. I knew I didn’t want to stay in the shadows and that there are other ways to process this loss and emptiness. I said, let’s stop. We have a great body of work, that I’m most proud of, because of what it represents. But let’s wait a little. I need to process all of this without gathering references and documenting it, as I have in my previous work. I’ve never stopped drawing as part of my practice, and I had noticed that I was doing it a lot more since the time at the hospital. Then I visited the site where I scattered some of my mother’s ashes. It’s a tree in Fort Tryon Park. This day the tree branches were shaking with so much activity. A variety of birds flying in and out of it, squirrels climbing, chipmunks circling around it. It was joyous, alive. I had an answer to my already creeping “inquietud.” Let the reluctant muse in, the one that accompanies the divine masculine and the inner teenager bringing the spirit of the beginner again. Let’s draw and paint a renewal of life after tragedy. The present, the living and if we look to the past, let’s depict the ancestry, the heritage, the contributions and contributors. Revisit abandoned works in line with this renewal, resolve and make what feels right and uplifts you. Don’t worry about the audience and outcome. Feel the void, but let the muse comfort you. Art is life. I want to live.

Reluctant Muse - 2026