Just a bit

My drawing journey began when I asked my first grade students to look at a single point on a whiteboard and tell me what animal they saw. Their responses ignited my own love for drawing. Drawing for my students and seeing their unique and meaningful interpretations showed me the power of their imagination and collaboration in real time. This inspired a shift in my teaching, as I recognized the impact visual art can have on learning and self-expression.

Since then, drawing has become an integral part of my life. Everything I have learned from studying philosophy, arts, and letters, as well as many years of teaching and living in many places, was channeled into this activity for which I had no prior training.

I often used to draw monsters to teach my Spanish students about the parts of the body. These drawings were quite deformed, but the kids found them amusing. In my free time between classes, I began to color photographs from magazines that I found in the office where I worked with the art teachers. I then moved on to coloring fashion and photography books, posters of famous paintings, and calendars. I colored and photographed a ridiculous amount of images. 

One day, I decided to create sketchbooks with some old paper and I made six little booklets that I drew in avidly. The third of these booklets marked a significant moment for me. The first drawing featured a jar-like figure in the center. I decided to continue with this basic idea for each page, and by the end of the booklet, I had created 16 related images. While the drawings were relatively simple, it wasn't clear what was happening there. 

I took the sketchbook to school, hoping that my students would have some ideas about what I had depicted. And they really did. I gathered five students from lower grades and brought them to my office. I had them sit down and then explained that they would be seeing a series of images and responding to a basic question: what do you see? As I presented the images one by one, the students had plenty of responses, all of them quite different and meaningful. The third graders complemented the observations made by the first graders and vice versa. They not only expressed what they thought they were seeing, but also created different narratives to explain the sequence of images. They were engaged, collaborating, and, to my joy as a teacher, happy and learning from each other. After about 40 minutes, we were done. My students had a lot of fun, and I realized that I was doing with images what I had previously done with university students using short pieces of great literature: opening a space for imagination to be stimulated, exteriorized, interpreted, criticized, and valued

In 2017, I began teaching at a school in Manhattan. My daily commute from Bedstuy to 96th Street on the C train gave me plenty of time to draw. I started to do it on the train every day, and the C train became my studio. My days were filled with drawings - ugly, weird, extravagant, surreal, dark, sloppy, symbolic, poetic drawings. My ability to hold a pen and a sketchbook and draw got better, as did my visual imagination. I never became discouraged by the aesthetic quality of my work, instead, I used my lack of formal training to fuel my desire to explore the medium. This train routine continued for 2 more years, but traveling further to New Rochelle, or any other place in New York City and anywhere else I had a chance to grab my pen and my sketchbook.

This bit of narrative offers a little glimpse into the origin of my drawing work while being a teacher. I want to reaffirm that I do not have a conventional art schooling. Nobody taught me how to create visual art but my eyes, my right hand, the art I see, the music that moves me, the museums I enjoyed, and the movies I love. This has been a visceral impulse that I follow blindly; a personal beautiful, mysterious lava that I revere devotionally. That created everything you can see in this web page or in my social platforms. I owe it to all the poetry that I have read and to the nature that inspires me to create.