The tajin

My mother made a special fish tajin sometimes, and somehow it always felt like an occasion.. even on an ordinary day.

I’m not sure what made it feel that way. Maybe the smell filling the house. Maybe just knowing it meant she’d taken extra care that day. Either way, it always felt like something worth dressing up for, even if no one actually did.

The process to paint this one was painful.. A fight. I thought it would be the easiest, ended up redoing the composition twice, and still don’t love it.. it’s last in the series for me. I think the stencil patterns compete with the fish pattern instead of supporting it, which is something I feel about the series as a whole: side by side, the pieces sometimes compete with each other instead of letting the eye rest.
But it bothered me most in this one. I was also running on empty at the time.. I was sensitive to heat, to cold, low on energy along some other health issues.. And some of that made its way in.

I called this series Mediterranean for a long time before I understood why.

It’s not about a coastline. It’s about the things that grow here, the things we share, the small rituals that exist all along this sea, different languages, same gestures. Someone always saving you the sweet piece. Someone always showing up with fruit from their own tree.

Each painting in this series started as something else entirely — a fruit, a vegetable, an everyday thing. But every one of them turned out to be about a person. A parent’s hands. A neighbor’s generosity. A summer ritual repeated so many times it became part of who I am.

These aren’t paintings of food.

They’re small portraits of love, told the only way my family ever really told it, through what ended up on the table.

This is where the series begins. Ten paintings, ten memories, all of them still warm.

Each piece in this series is mixed media and oil; the first layers built with collage, stencils, acrylics and other dry media, then refined and finished in oil. I call this style abstract realism: only the main subject is painted with realistic detail, while everything around it stays loose, textured, abstracted.