Tanya Torres  
Art for Love, Peace and Joy

For Mary Magdalene’s Day, Moonlight Prayer is an offering, a meditation and a prayer.

When I paint Mary Magdalene, I look for softness. I want her iconic face to be timeless, ageless and peacefully detached. I want her iconography to subtly come through without great gestures. Light in the shape of a cross on her forehead. Tears of light down her cheeks. Her voice invisibly shining through her throat chackra. Red for her veil. Skin the color of the earth. I want her to be present in the image and say with paint what is difficult to say in words. Beyond the sto

This painting still needs a few touches. The photo is not great, but I wanted to share it because I had shared the drawing and beginning to the painting a while ago and it stayed waiting on my easel for a long time until this past Saturday…

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

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

Today’s drawing of Mary Magdalene My studio smells of the past, of early days in my college’s painting studio, and of old days before fully launching myself as an artist. I closed the door of my studio so the smells will remain a little longer. I don’t think of the past too much, this is just a coincidence, part of 2 works in progress that contain the same materials as those past times. But it’s comforting to find that the memories remind me of the essence of who I am. That

Many years ago, I wrote about the tears of Mary Magdalene . It was the last post about the last painting of Mary Magdalene in the first series I painted. The series culminated in her tears, tears of much more than pain. Tears are the main attribute of the Magdalene in art. Her tears tell us about the pain and about the liberation to be experienced when we face love and death. Her tears are transformative. Mary Magdalene’s Tears , oil painting in progress. And it is transform

Mary Magdalene , watercolor on Arches paper, 9” wide by 12” height, 2025. I started this watercolor this week, but was only able to finish it today. It starts with a simple drawing I use sometimes when I want to get some proportions I find pleasing. I remember drawing this “seed” drawing, one of those line drawings that just come out harmonious in a few lines. The image is always a little different even if I use the original drawing as a guide. Watercolor is a medium I use wh

Mary Magdalene: Meditation with the Earth, Tanya Torres, Oil on Canvas, 18”W x24”H, 2025. I have been working on this painting for several weeks. Each time adding color or detail until it seems finished. It never really seems finished! But it’s got to be all done at some point. It’s time to stop. We tend to look at our completed work as somewhat lacking. It always needs more. But years later, when we come back to it, and reencounter it, we inevitably realize that it was done