I’ve spent the last 35 years training and working as an artist, a painter to be more exact. Alongside that I’ve done many menial jobs to support myself. The reason for this is that I wanted to keep my work uninfluenced by a world of commerce until it was fully developed. A bit naïve in thought but with very successful results. What I have arrived at because of this is a way of working that is uniquely mine. The greatness in this unhurried 35 years is that at age 55 I get to make only the work that I want to see. This being, the story of a homosexual immigrant and his mother in this new land that adopted us.

Stylistically, a little bit of everything I love, Grandma Moses, Hopper, Utrillo, Rosseau and the Modernists who followed him, my contemporary training that I acquired at The School of Visual Arts, with characters like Joseph Kosuth screaming, “Painting is Dead!”, Anina Weber (Nosei) speaking about avant-garde film and Hannah Wilke, my favorite, giving us pink bubblegum to chew during class so she could make her bubblegum vaginas, this and a little of my Cuban Flava makes up what it is that I do.

And, what I do, is simply a portrait that I call mother and i, whether in Technicolor or Single-Color, it is a story of an immigrant woman and her son and her unselfish devotion to his survival, education and placement in the world. In a heroic act of self-sacrifice she forgot that she was a woman in her late thirties and became a factory worker who worked 16 hours a day to make ends meet. As I turned 40 and economically unstable, I wanted to say Thank you to Gladys and this is what I came up with, a body of work where I give her everything she did not have in real life, elaborate hairdos, fancy designer dresses, lavished surroundings all placed in the time period where she would have enjoyed them. More importantly, the placement of the character is telling my Mother’s philosophy for success which is Be Deaf to the World and Look Only in One Direction. The character in the painting always looking to the right, symbolic of my mother’s truth and has earlobes with no ears, to represent the idea of deaf to people’s opinions. In essence, my 35 years of training and experience has brought me to only one conclusion: To make art all you need is a story and the truth and if you’re lucky the story you are telling pertains to you and your surroundings.