Culmination of “Conrayitos”

And then came the pandemic…

Many of the pieces below served as experiments that challenged everything I believed my art was supposed to be. The resistance was so intense that I nearly gave up on art altogether. At this point, most pieces were just made to earn the grade, good enough for the assignment, yet mediocre for my standards.

To continue the story of Conrayitos, it took me so many years of practice to finally understand why painting sometimes felt so empty. It was like a suffocating loneliness paired with an overcrowded mind, the kind of noise that made finishing the simplest of pieces feel unbearable.

Eventually, I realized that beneath all the precision and control lived so much fear, hesitation, and denial of passion. I owe this realization to the professors who endured my high walls, my self-doubt disguised as arrogance, and my complete disregard for the curriculum. They pushed through my resentment and my desperate grip on everything I thought I knew, forcing me to fail and evolve out of my comfort zone.

Still, I thank the masochist in me who insisted on becoming a diamond under pressure. Once I found the courage to let go, I began to feel almost invincible with a brush in my hand. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all of this, it’s that as an older sibling with a long record of learning things the hard way, secondhand wisdom was rarely my teacher; experience was.