“My Mother Holding Her Mother (Portrait of Maria del Carmen Rodriguez Viuda Brea)”
oil on canvas
27x36” (69x86cm)
- If all goes according to plan, I'll be delivering this piece to my grandmother in the Dominican Republic this July
“Mayan Water Lily Jaguar”
coffee & acrylic on unprimed canvas
32×34″ (81x86cm)
- the coffee grounds adhered to the canvas were used to create the coffee I painted with, and were sourced from Southern Mexico where my father's lineage is from
- in Mayan mythology, the Jaguar is the keeper of the "underworld" and uses psychedelic methods (represented by the trippy effect on the water lilies) to take a traveler there
- I do have prints of this piece if anyone is interested
“Remembrance”
oil and gouache on watercolor paper mounted on wood panel
20×30″ (51×76)
- a commission for a friend, this process was really wonky, see this IG post for an image of how I almost totally botched this canvas.
“The Nelson Lawn”
oil on canvas
15×28″ (38x71cm)
- painted in plein air with a palette knife over three hours in front of Kansas City's premiere art museum
“Mayan Constructivism”
gouache & ink on cold press paper
11×14″ (28x36cm)
- a commission for a friend from Burning Man
Thank you! I started painting four years ago, and transferred over from the realm of jazz composition (my undergrad is as a jazz bassist). With music, especially jazz, there’s much less of this sense of “stay in your lane” as there is with visual art. This sense of exploration, along with no formal visual art training, has provided me the comfort to feel free to do whatever I want visually.
As someone who has taken mushrooms and seen eerily Mayan-esque art come pulsating out of the carpets, walls, trees, or pretty much anything with a texture... It makes me wonder if my knowledge (though admittedly lacking) of the history and culture of shamanism is to blame, or if there is something like chemically-induced geometric associations that drove that style of art. What do you think? No wrong answers :). Love the red-blue, out-of-focus water lilies. How much for a print of that second artwork?
Great question! Also I very much appreciate your openness to state that you consume shrooms. I love magic mushrooms and really believe our modern American culture could undergo a lot of healing through the respectful ingestion of the fungus. As with most indigenous groups of the world, the Mayans had their own local variety of mushrooms they'd consume to travel elsewhere (intentionally leaving this wording vague). I'm no scientist, but from my robust personal experience with psychedelics, there do seem to be parallel experiences based on the substance consumed. For example with DMT, all of my experiences, and those I've facilitated for others, do involve the "elf" entities so many people describe as part of their experience. It would not surprise me in the slightest that your consumption of mushrooms would bring about the specific color and geometric combinations that would allude to the Mayan drawing styles (and probably also Aztec which is similar yet significantly different). Have you ever checked out the Mayan Codices? There are only four remaining today, but there were once thousands. insert cheeky comment about how the colonizers destroyed these documents in bonfires. This page gives the slightest bit of context of the four that remain. The page states they were drawn on pages made from fig trees. I have also seen that the leaves of the maguey plant were peeled into thin sheets, dried and turned in to paper. The dude in this video is quite a character, but you can see how he is able to create the paper from the maguey. Here's a link to where you can see the pages of the Dresden Codex. Your local university library may have a copy of the codices. There's a special collection here at the University of Missouri-Kansas City's library where I was able to view reproductions of the codices in their entirety. Hopefully this answers your question! I'll send you a message about the printsomething like chemically-induced geometric associations that drove that style of art
Wow these are fantastic, I absolutely love them
Thank you! If you’d like to see more of work I’ve got them posted up on my website
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