Untitled Icon (María Dolores). Oil on canvas. 36 x 24”. Made in South Korea in 2010.
The obscured figure of a diva, a carefully devised construct of culture eclipsed due to human and technological ineffectiveness and my own subjectivity.
Notes on process: A music video made during the tape and television era for a square screen, its main subject a woman who sings fervently. It gets formatted and reformatted as it passes onto the digital world, gathering artifacts such as lines and floating pixels, stretching horizontally, gaining contrast, and loosing detail. I find it on YouTube as if revealing an ancient secret that speaks about my truth. I feel the diva is the embodiment of the culture that I inherited and I accept her as an icon of my ancestry but YouTube is stalling on the free Wi-Fi signal I get in my 13th floor Apartment, so I switch the quality settings to 240p. I go full screen, I take a screenshot, I photoshop it and blow it up, reticulate it and then trace it onto paper directly from my screen, it take a long time because it’s quite big for my laptop. I transfer that drawing onto canvass, I mix my paint and go by stages, 1, 2, 3; grisaille, permanent layers and direct technique.
Note: the light-colored stripes on at the top and bottom are part of the painting.