Artist Statement

I draw abstracted and distorted human bodies floating in space. My figures are always in a state of change or disestablishment. At the same time, I make pieces that exist in the midgrounds between painting and drawing, both finished and unfinished, opaque and translucent. My main media are oil paint, graphite, and pastel on canvas and paper.

I like the feeling of suspense and potential found in the in-between. Inspired by my studies of evolution, botany, and ecology, I present bodies and identities as part of an ever-changing system - seemingly fixed but, in their truest forms, always in flux. As I grow up and explore new social spheres, I see the self as a similar thing: never really fixed but always in a state of becoming and unbecoming. Every time we find ourselves somewhere new, our sense of self must be unmade and made again. As life itself (all species, trees, animals) came to be through a clumsy, almost aimless process of making, unmaking and making again, my human bodies evolve and devolve constantly. Life to me is an unfortunate yet hilarious process of stumbling forward, growing almost by accident. We are mutating, merging, dissolving, and coalescing into temporarily static versions of something or other. 

I have found kindred spirits in poets such as Whitman and John Donne - metaphysical thinkers inspired by the (both spiritual and scientific) ideas of interconnection between people and their environment. From Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, an additive and never-static poetry collection,: “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Whitman saw all of creation and mankind in a single blade of grass, as I have seen in the cycling organelles of cells under a microscope. 

My paintings are kind, calm and warm. Harmonic palettes hold my mutating bodies, reassuring us that the chaotic nature of evolution is generative, constructive and hopefully something we can embrace. Transformation can be terrifying, but my work seeks to accept change and to lean into the not knowing, the discovering the way as we walk it.

Camila Vela