Tanya Torres  
Art for Love, Peace and Joy

Continued progress Progress may not be noticeable, but this painting has an extra 4 hours of work from the last version I posted here. It’s a slow process to finish a painting. I only worked on the face, the foot, the hand and the hair. Now it needs to dry again before painting another layer. The last month of the year is here. It’s been a long year of work, thinking, dreaming and hoping. I have been working on rebuilding the bases of my art practice. It’s a process that beco

Painting is still in progress. I spent the day painting, back to the painting in progress that I have been working on this month. I changed several things in it and… there probably will be more changes. It still needs a lot of work, but it’s getting closer. It is at this point that a painting requires trust and faith. It’s the moment when it’s not working, when it’s tempting to let it go and start over with a white canvas. But after so much work, one becomes reluctant to let

Yesterday’s drawing of Mary Magdalene Today’s drawing of Mary Magdalene I was planning to write yesterday, but my mother in law visited me in my studio, and I ended up just listening to her. It was Thanksgiving Day after all, and she is someone to whom I owe much gratitude. She was the person who took care of my son when I went back to work, who took care of me when I was sick, and who took us in, the whole family and later on the two cats, when we had to leave our house. She

Today’s drawing of Mary Magdalene In art, patterns help us give rhythm, interest and variety to a work of art. They fill areas, they make our eyes move around the piece. Patterns repeat, take us back to the beginning, and make us stay with the piece. They are pleasurable to the eye because they are predictable. By breaking a pattern we can also break the rhythm, on purpose. Unpredictability is also pleasing to the mind. It invites the imagination to create. Sometimes we are o

Today’s drawing of Mary Magdalene I have to admit that as I age, I have been feeling less passion in general. It reminds me of my father, who around my age, felt similarly. All his previous life, he had been a passionate man who developed many projects and whose enthusiasm was so contagious that he would easily recruit people, including me since I was a child, to help him turn his ideas into reality. In his 50s, I suspect, he was feeling like I feel these days, not wanting to

Drawing from yesterday, continued today, more work tomorrow. I have a list of symbols, simple things I want to give the Magdalene. It’s a long list, that means a lot of paintings. Some I have painted before, but there’s always room for new interpretations. Some are hard to paint and make universal, like my little house in Puerto Rico. Universal is important to me. There are things that we all like and revere just because we are humans on Earth. Like a bird, a heart, roses. Li

Painting in progress I wish I had one more weekend day! But it’s back to work tomorrow. I do in a weekend as much as possible, which is never enough, but is more than I was doing before. One brushstroke at a time, I have 3 watercolors and one painting in progress. And 2 drawings. My list was much longer, but I do what I can. The most important action of the day(s) was starting the right way, with meditation and joy to live one more day. When you have been close to death, appr