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I am White and Latina, bilingual, with a Uruguayan father and American mother. Papá emigrated from Uruguay to the U.S. in 1963. My mother left St. Louis, Missouri in 1964 to teach ballet on the west coast. They met and married in San Francisco, California, where I was born. We moved to Portland, Oregon when I was eight. I currently live eleven months of the year in Beaverton, Oregon, with my two cats, and one month of the year in Uruguay with my father's close knit family.
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I have spent my adult life pursuing art in a non-traditional way, as a second career and a hobby. I've fortunate to discover people who have appreciated my illustrative style.
I am largely self-taught. Evenings after work and during the lovely expanse of summer free time, I have pursued art classes to enrich my technique. One teacher, in particular, instilled in me the basic anatomy of the body. Another, the importance of scale. And the third, color layering and the need for visual references. From the murals, in Mission neighborhood of San Francisco where I went to school, I fell in love with bright colors. To this day, I must have a palette with as many hues of paint as I can afford. |
I chose the career of teaching small children, to recreate for others the encouragement I had received from my kindergarten teacher. I dreamed of teaching them to create art, but most importantly, to find their own style. Art has always been my favorite subject of the week.
Early in my twenties, I discovered that it was unnecessary to always render subjects in a photo-realistic manner. And I have never looked back, favoring a graphic novel or children's illustration style.
My godmother, a very good friend of my parents, was the first to expose me to art museums when I was seven, and I always find them inspirational I quietly take in visual input, which sets in motion new directions in my work.
Here are some artists that have changed the way I work: |
I have always been one to express myself more with feelings than facts. To me, life is for making meaning, and connection.
My way of thinking has always been visual, emotional, deliberate, and passionate. From as little as I can remember I was drawing and painting, and my parents fed their young artist with as many art supplies as they could, and praised my work, posting it throughout our home. My mother knew that if I didn't want to create art, that I must be ailing in some way. My parents both had artistic inclinations--my father drew, wove tapestries, and embroidered. My mother played the piano, danced ballet, and loved to draw. 
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Frida Kahlo used bold rich color and biographical images and to share intense feelings.
Gaughin used colors that were shocking and bold, along with an illustrative style to portraiture. And the female form to him was
more beautiful plump, with curves. 
Henry Sugimoto's paintings of the Japanese experience before, during, and after internment were like illustrations in children's books, and although two dimensionally flat in nature, the compositions were quite complex with action.
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Matisse created forms that were not limited by looking like
a realistic photograph, instead the feeling meant much more.. 
Roger Shimomura depicted, in his Minidoka series, Japanese internment through differing points of view and made me consider composition of my pieces so they show more than
one perspective. |
Vincent Van Gogh created motion and textures with all sorts of lines.
Cezanne's landscapes and still lives used brush texture marks to create form and variation of methods
to draw out the composition and fill it with color. 
Estelle Ishigo, a white artist, interned with her Japanese husband, delivered emotional punch with pencil drawings that did not need color to tell
the message. |
My intent with each of my paintings is to evoke emotion. I begin with a specific idea in mind. I use images as visual reference. Color and composition choices help me get my message across. While my graphic images are in general not realistic like a photograph, they convey instead a story in illustration.
One of my current projects is putting together an illustrated fictionalized story of a family and how they cope with the Japanese Internment. My goal is to produce it as a coffee table book. I originally started in an effort to tie the big book to a unit I was teaching in third grade, but it evolved into a rather complex series of detailed illustrations that were two dimensional in more of a graphic novel style. Writing the text has been a long process. I researched the Japanese Internment during the Second World War for a year, finding primary documents that contained factual and anecdotal information. With the help of Densho's website with firsthand accounts, photographs from the different camps, and art made by those interned, I decided on which images to use to tell the different parts of the story. My book is based on the experiences of Oregonians interned at Portland Assembly Center who were later moved to the Minidoka Internment Camp in Idaho. When viewing my illustrations, I want people to remember that each person's life journey is related to our own in some way, despite whatever differences may exist between us in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or politics.
My work has in the past sold only to individuals through gallery showings, coffee shop exhibitions, art fairs, commissions, and to friends who have admired my portfolio of work.
It is my hope that you will enjoy what you see and want to purchase a piece for your home or office collection. I am also interested in collaborating on books to do the illustrations. I also make prints, quilts, jewelry, and cards that can be given as gifts. I also thoroughly enjoy doing pet portrait commissions.
One of my current projects is putting together an illustrated fictionalized story of a family and how they cope with the Japanese Internment. My goal is to produce it as a coffee table book. I originally started in an effort to tie the big book to a unit I was teaching in third grade, but it evolved into a rather complex series of detailed illustrations that were two dimensional in more of a graphic novel style. Writing the text has been a long process. I researched the Japanese Internment during the Second World War for a year, finding primary documents that contained factual and anecdotal information. With the help of Densho's website with firsthand accounts, photographs from the different camps, and art made by those interned, I decided on which images to use to tell the different parts of the story. My book is based on the experiences of Oregonians interned at Portland Assembly Center who were later moved to the Minidoka Internment Camp in Idaho. When viewing my illustrations, I want people to remember that each person's life journey is related to our own in some way, despite whatever differences may exist between us in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or politics.
My work has in the past sold only to individuals through gallery showings, coffee shop exhibitions, art fairs, commissions, and to friends who have admired my portfolio of work.
It is my hope that you will enjoy what you see and want to purchase a piece for your home or office collection. I am also interested in collaborating on books to do the illustrations. I also make prints, quilts, jewelry, and cards that can be given as gifts. I also thoroughly enjoy doing pet portrait commissions.
