After a long month spent renovating this site and consolidating an image I have been refining for the past four years, I am at last happy to say I am ready to return to my drawing table. It may not be obvious to most people, but a website plays an important role in an artist’s life. I think of my site as my online home; I want it to be inviting and represent me.
The past month has been a steep learning curve. I wouldn’t consider myself “tech-savvy” or a web designer by any stretch of the imagination, but I get by with technology. The renovation went beyond my usual skill set and would not have been possible without AI’s assistance. I feel conflicted about that. As a working artist, I abhor many of the ways generative AI is used in visual art. Working artists already face enough challenges; having their work taken without consent or compensation so that others can generate images makes the road they travel even more difficult. Profiting from people’s work without properly compensating them is as low as it gets for me.
Artists spend a lifetime refining skill and building a distinctive vision, while tech companies build systems that make aspects of that achievement available to anyone on a whim.
I’m looking forward to getting back to my drawing table and doing what I do best, with music wafting through the air in my petite atelier. Before I began renovating my site, I was working on several projects that were crucial to me. After decades of incessant toil, vision, philosophy, style, and technique have finally converged in a way that allows me to redefine what I want an image to do.
In a recent Studio Note, I talked about my work on a reimagined portrait of Pre-Raphaelite muse Fanny Eaton that’s currently sitting on my drawing table. My original drawing of Fanny first appeared in Drawing The Pre-Raphaelites, a six-page article published by the Pre-Raphaelite Society in their journal, the PRS Review, in the summer of 2025. Ever since its publication, I’ve felt there was more potential left to explore.
Over time, my drawing has become a significant image for me, one that will offer people a new experience rooted in stillness and emotion. The drawing has become part of a new series through which I am developing my theory of creating images that invite people to step into them and explore. Rather than dictate a particular response, I want to create space for an individual experience.
Fanny Eaton brought depth and richness to the world she inhabited and to the work of the artists she collaborated with. Her presence is a reminder that Pre-Raphaelitism wasn’t as unvaried as it looks from a distance, and her legacy begs deeper investigation and reinterpretation. As a working artist of Hispanic heritage, I feel that I too can bring something unique to this nearly 180-year-old tradition.
While I am not fond of labels being applied to me or to what I do, I cannot deny the role my heritage plays in who I am. I grew up knowing two distinct cultures: the Hispanic culture of my heritage and the broader American culture around me. The images, sounds, and flavors I grew up with allow me to bring a distinctive perspective to 21st-century Pre-Raphaelite art.
I am fortunate to have grown up within such a diverse world. I draw inspiration as comfortably from Edward Burne-Jones and Joaquín Sorolla as I do from Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, and Kate Bush. What connects them for me is the singularity of their vision. Each created something unmistakably their own. Their example has taught me that influence need not lead to imitation; it can become the raw material for one’s own vision.
After a month away, I am eager to get back to the work that awaits me. There are ideas there that I have only begun to explore. For the time being, they will remain in the pages of my sketchbook as I develop and refine them. The next step is not to explain them; it’s to explore them line by line.