Untitled series, 2026. Oil paint, watercolor, and acrylic paint on wood panel, 11’ x 14’, 18’ x 24’, and 24’ x 26.’
This painting collection is the product of a summer residency where I focused on material and compositional exploration.
Created during a residency at the New York Academy of Art, an institution rooted in traditional figurative realism, this series emerged as an intuitive counter-response to formal structure. After poring over the scintillating Impressionist and Abstract Expressionist works at the Met and MoMA, as well as Remedios Varo’s alchemical, Surrealist images at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City later in the summer, I felt an impulse to create from memory with a subtle nod to the art history of Mexico—my parents’ birthplace. While my guiding inspiration leans toward the quiet precision, shadowy texture, and emotional honesty of historic painters like Vermeer, Friedrich, and Andrew Wyeth, this summer became an intentional exercise in aesthetic rebellion. By abandoning rigid naturalistic representation for unabashed abstraction, these pieces document a necessary test of my own artistic boundaries, ultimately clarifying my commitment to the artistic qualities I value most.
These intuitive, semi-abstract, and colorful works document an unbridled phase of material exploration and creative contrast. The minute details and bizarre, semi-austere figures perform strikingly, yet silently.
With an eye to the verdaccio tradition (an underpainting technique of 15th-century Italy), I drew from imagination, urban life, and literature to conjure magical realist and uncanny scenes where people and trees gather. Using oil paint, gouache, and gesso on wood panels, this untitled series comprises a crowded scene of figures alongside a piece dedicated solely to trees. The subjects are foregrounded: either resting in silent repose, making direct eye contact with the viewer, or wandering as amorphous shapes across the picture plane. A strong, grounded verticality connects all the paintings, from the legs of city passersby to the interspersed figures and tree branches in the middle painting, and finally to the magical canopy of the rightmost panel. The figures defy the composed, calculated demeanors commonly expected of historical subjects.
The layers and varying transparency of the watercolor and oil paintings reveal their underlying pentimenti (pencil marks and preliminary washes of color). By unveiling the creative process in parts—akin to the task of an art conservator—this series invites an intimate, dreamlike dynamic between my work and you, the observer.
Illustration by Lori Lai
