my story

I am a disciple of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pablo Picasso, and Diego Rivera.

From Basquiat, I learned to trust instinct - to move without hesitation.

From Picasso, I learned to break the rules - but only after understanding them.

From Rivera, I learned to carry my heritage with pride and to represent my culture without compromise.

I paint intuitively. Every stroke is deliberate, even when it appears spontaneous.

I grew up an American kid in a Mexican household on the West Side of Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Raised alongside my siblings under the watchful eye of my grandmother, I learned early how to read people - how to understand character, integrity, and the forces that shape both.

School didn’t come easy. Life did.

By the time I was 25, I had worked security in casinos and bars before becoming a bartender.

It was my job to observe - to anticipate, to recognize shifts in energy, to understand people before they spoke.

That awareness still lives in my work.

When my son was born, everything shifted.

I knew I needed to build something different for my life. I wasn’t meant to follow a conventional path, so I turned to photography. That quickly evolved into painting.

In 2007, I showed my first piece, Adelitas, in a small coffee shop in Saint Paul.

At first, my work was defined by my culture - and I was labeled a “Mexican artist.” I wasn’t ashamed of that, but I resisted being confined by it. I explored abstraction to push beyond expectation. Now, I embrace both. I want people to say: He is a Mexican artist - and look at the range of his work.

I paint across identities, across cultures. I paint for the marginalized, for those who resist oppression, and for those whose stories deserve to be seen with beauty and power. I paint to make people visible.

Minnesota shaped me - but it also limited me. It taught me resilience, discipline, and the value of hard work. It taught me love, loss, and vulnerability. But I never felt fully accepted as an artist. So I left.

With my dog and everything I could fit into my truck, I drove west. I eventually found my way to Seattle, where I was accepted as a vendor at Pike Place Market. More importantly, I was accepted as an artist.

It wasn’t easy. There were setbacks - housing struggles, rejection, doubt. But people reminded me: You belong here. That mattered.

Over time, my work continued to evolve. Fifteen years at Pike Place Market exposed me to people from all over the world - different cultures, different perspectives, different ways of seeing and being. It changed me. It changed my work. I became drawn to the collision of cultures - the tension and harmony that exists when different identities, beliefs, and histories share the same space. Pop culture. City life. Global energy. All of it found its way into my work.

But evolution isn’t just expansion - it’s return. I’ve found myself reconnecting with my own culture in a deeper way. Not from a place of expectation, but from a place of ownership. I’m painting my heritage again - but now, it’s on my terms.

My work lives in that space— Between cultures. Between identities. Between where I come from and everything I’ve experienced since.

I don’t paint one story anymore. I paint many.

Everything I do is rooted in something deeper. I have Mayan glyphs tattooed on my fingers representing my children’s birthdates. Everything I create with my hands carries them forward. They are my why.

Art has given me a way to step out of the world and into myself. It has been therapy. Survival. Transformation. My work holds emotion, conversation, and contradiction - pain and forgiveness, memory and vision. It’s not just about my story. It’s about all of ours.