Drawing was a coping mechanism and a way for me to communicate when I was a child. My family moved to the USA from Caracas, Venezual when I was still in diapers. I had already been facing the challenges if isolation and a speech impediment that made it very difficult to speak, a bad stutter that last until I was 12. I had attended several different schools before junior high so drawing student’s portraits became a way for me to self sooth and make friends. Painting and drawing in the figurative has been my practice, with an emphasis in portraiture, since I was is middle school. Grad school was when I allowed myself to expand my thoughts and focus on surrealism. This was where I created layers of depth through symbolism and rendering. From my experience in design and advertsing, I use photoshop to build my reference. It starts out as a drawing, a thought, then photos are taken and layers of images are used to create the reference. Paintings share a balance of the knowledge of form and light through memory along with having the actual visual reference to capture detail. I can always tell if something is painted from imagination and memory versus having the image from life or camera. For surealism to exist, one must have a balance of imaginative form and reality for something to be convincingly perplexing.