LA MATERNIDAD

My 1st ever painting - Peru, January 2019.

I never dreamed of becoming a painter in this lifetime.

Most of my education was focused on arts and design but, being very honest, I was always miserable in drawing. Generally speaking, I was a very bad student for a long time, not due to learning disabilities, but to a complete lack of interest about what was going on in the classroom. However, everything changed in high school when I was introduced to psychedelics, which aroused my interest for studying and books.

At the age of 34, I started having clear signs of burnout from running my own business so, looking for help, I decided to go to Peru for a plant diet. By that time, I had already been experimenting with sacred plants for a while. I felt the call to go deeper in my (re)search and Peru seemed the right place to go. The whole experience was as traumatizing as rewarding — I hope to, one day, find the right words to write about it.

Landed in Peru, I was picked from the airport by Limbert Gonzales (a disciple of the famous visionary painter Pablo Amaringo). We passed by his studio in Pucallpa and, after noticing my interest in his art, Limbert suggested he could meet me in the jungle during my diet, to teach me how to put my visions into the canvas.

Limbert came right at the beginning of my diet, so I could spend the whole month of retreat dedicated to this painting.

We did Ayahuasca ceremonies every 2 days during the dietA, which allowed me to concentrate even more on what to paint and how to paint it.

This was how I discovered my hidden talent.

If today I’m a painter, it is due to my first Ayahuasca ceremony in 2014, which happened in Costa Rica at Casa de las Mariposas (mariposa means butterfly in Spanish). On our first encounter, Ayahuasca’s message to me was to trust my destiny, because I would surely become everything I aim for.

Interestingly, during my whole dieta, I started being visited by butterflies and they started landing on my canvas oftenly. After spending sometime analyzing these colorful little creatures, they became my main source of inspiration -- they do no harm, they make us smile whenever they pass by, and always leave us with this feeling that everything is OK. They only stop where they feel good and go away with the tiniest turbulence. They seem to know their way... this is precisely how I wish my art to be remembered.