I was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia.

Ever since I can remember I wanted to be a painter… but then as I graduated from high school I developed my interest for music and then fashion.

 

I struggled to finish the Colombian high school demands so I ended up graduating from the Linden Hall School for Girls, (the oldest feminine boarding school in the US), with emphasis in art, music and literature, specially studying  voice and piano.

When I went back to Bogotá in June of 1975, I began to study drawing and continued private lessons of classical guitar, piano and voice and later took part at the Los Andes University Choir.

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During the years 1986 ,1987 and 1988, I was a figure drawing -fashion illustration professor at the Textile Department, for their last semester, at the University of Los Andes and other institutions, in Bogotá -Colombia.  I also gave drawing lessons at my home studio.

Back then, I lived for some months in the Colombian island of San Andres, where I began to paint.

 

After some changes in my private life, I took Art courses and workshops between 1979 and 1991, in Manhattan, Tarrytown and Southampton in New York and in Rome, Florence and Venice in Italy.

 

I moved from Bogotá to Cartagena back in 1996 so, for more than twenty years my horizon has been the ocean. There was a very different perception of life, even though it is the same country, so my body of work changed.

I have not been showing my work in exhibitions consistently, therefore I am displaying several images from my earlier work, like still lifes and selfportraits , because they were my way of learning and practicing the art of painting and mastering the way of seeing and as years went by, my process comes and goes trying to find light and meaning at the end of the road.

 

As a latin woman, my subjects often relates to the woman that awaits, the woman that dreams of becoming a beauty pageant and to wear a pompous princess dress and a crown in different stages of life.

In Cartagena the women that sell the fruit carrying it on top of their heads is called a "Palenquera", mostly come from Palenque, which is one of the  first towns founded by freed slaves back in the colonial times......and still, this is a way of making a living. I depict the Palenquera´s fruit bowl in the form of a fruit and a crown and sometimes wearing a princess gown.

“THE NEXT PERFECT PLACE”,  is the pursued for that perfect paradise which many of us search, sometimes I take phrases found  from the travel magazines that are selling us paradise, sometimes they are  my own experiences as I travel. "The paradise" mainly parallells with "caribbean" with turquoise ocean color and palms.

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On VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE is my memory of seeing Colombia´s villages since I was a child.

Paintings in my series CONTRALUZ - "BACKLIGHT", are sometimes figures painted that appear dark because of the backlight , leading to different interpretations.