Adiós, Mi Corazón

“The bigger the wound, the more private the pain.”

~Isabell Allende

Hey,

It’s been an awfully long time since the last post, hasn’t it? I know, terribly unprofessional and all that. Unfortunately I gotta hell of an excuse for it.

As someone who has a fairly notorious online presence –at least as far as the paranormal/UFO world is concerned– I don’t like sharing too much about my personal life. And after all, this page was always intended to be a sort of work portfolio / hub to podcast interviews and related material anyway. The last time I shared something here, I had just finished another card in the UFOlogy Tarot project, and was about to embark in the next one. The future looked very promising for me in 2022 since for most of the year I wouldn’t need to worry financially thanks to the great response we had with our Kickstarter campaign.

And then, something happened.

On January 28th I lost my mom due to COVID. My entire world was uprooted overnight. Just in the moment when I was beginning to savor the fruits of success after DECADES of failure, exploitation and bad luck, the worst thing that’s ever happened in my life came to smear it all with shit.

Luckily I had the support of a strong family safety net –which became even stronger due to this calamity– and a small group of friends who helped me during this horrible time. And there was also the work, which helped me numb the pain somewhat. If you follow me on Twitter you know I’ve kept working on the cards non-stop –even though my timeline is not what I’d like it to be. Oh well.

But along the Tarot work I came up with the idea for the illustration on top of this post. It’s a fairly simple composition, but it actually took me up until now to build up the courage to actually commit it to paper. And yes, even though I mostly consider myself a digital artist, I felt this needed to be done the old fashioned way, where a single mistake can ruin the whole thing and you need to start all over again –which I actually did: the image is the THIRD attempt I made due to lack of practice and nervousness. After I tore up the second sketch I remembered the words of my friend and fellow artist Barbara Fisher who once told me, “there’s always more paper.” That really helped.

I had this notion that before I could resume with my usual regular posts I needed to complete this image first. Not doing so felt totally hypocritical for me. I kept stalling and stalling until I couldn’t postpone it any longer; but now the work is done and as I look at it, with all its notorious imperfections (if only there was an “undo” button in the real world, am I right? And I guess that was the point of this exercise) I am content with it, and I know my mom would have liked it as well. Of all the people in my life, she was the only one who always let me know how proud she was of me and my work.

Te extraño, Ma. Hasta que nos volvamos a reunir.

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