dulcinea moran

The Journey of a Painter:

The Portfolio of Dulcinea Moran

Color has captivated my soul and stolen my heart since my first days in this life. As a child, I remember stepping down my front steps and being astounded that bright blues, deep magentas, and lush greens could all exist in the same space. Constantly stopping myself in my tracks to thoroughly investigate all the colors that make up that rhododendron by my shoe or the moody Pacific Northwest clouds overhead on my walk to the park: this sense of wonder is where my creative process begins.

It was two days before my fourteenth birthday when trauma struck my family. My father lost his life to a fruitless battle with drug addiction. My brothers and I were, of course, stunned. Paralyzed. Isolated. Confused. All I wanted was for time to stop. My concerned mother saw me in my depressive state and asked me, earnestly, “What is one thing you want to learn how to do? It can be anything. Anything. Just something to bring you a little bit of joy.” Without a need to ponder, I instantly knew my answer to her question: “I want to learn how to paint.” In the following weeks, I was signed up for weekly intensive painting classes. I completely immersed myself in a world of expression, color, investigation, research, creation, healing: I found a space where, somehow, I could make time feel like it was stopping. A space for me to catch my breath and just be.

Throughout my teen years, I took my art very seriously. I enrolled in all of the advanced art classes at my school. I showed my work in small shows around my hometown. I won the Art Student of the Year award my senior year of high school. I continued my private painting lessons, and interned at the studio where the classes took place just to immerse myself in the world of art as much as I could. I would come home from school each day, do my homework, and then paint until the wee hours of the morning. I developed the discipline aspect of being an artist from an early age as I saw the personal benefits of committing to a consistent, curious painting practice. Eventually, I applied and was accepted to Western Washington University to earn my Bachelors in Fine Arts. I spent the next four years researching, questioning, and developing my first fully-synthesized body of work, a series I titled Colorscapes.

Colors of the natural world as well as the fantastical would flood my mind as I closed my eyes. Whether I was  trying to capture a dream or embody a tangible experience, my Colorscapes were a way of releasing my thoughts while simultaneously indulging in my lust for color. Within this body of work, I was primarily concerned with emotional release / creating safe emotional spaces and color expressions, and far less concerned with form or line. I wanted to create a soft, dream-like experience where the viewer could feel weightless, held, that everything was going to be okay. These were feelings I was searching for in the act of painting, and I wanted my audience to know that they, too, were going to be okay. These process-based works were indeed calming, but at the same time energizing for me; the physical movements of the body held equal importance to the paintings themselves.  This body of work is where I found myself as an artist.

Throughout my undergraduate program, I also explored other media such as collage, monotype printing, fibers and fabrics, and drawing. Looking back, exploring these materials that I had never used before was pivotal in my work, even though these mixed media works didn’t necessarily visually resemble my paintings. Playing with the print press got me to understand layers in a new way. Learning how to properly draw the figure strengthened my ability to render form with a paint brush. When I first started experimenting with alternative materials, I almost felt a guilt set in. Thoughts like “Am I still a painter if I am not only painting? Does this collage make me less of a painter?” would swirl around my mind. However, I came to this conclusion: cutting and pasting paper is just as much painting as using a brush and oils. Painting is a feeling. Painting is a dance. Painting is layering, experimentation, and non-attachment. I am painting when I am dancing, when I am doing yoga, when I am collaging, and, of course, when I am painting. To free myself of this limited way of thinking, imposed by self and art discourse, opened up painting for me in a new, enchanted way. Following you will find two selected samples of mixed media work I made around the same time as my Colorscapes.

After a few years in my Colorscapes series, I found my practice changing. I started to become drawn to organic lines. I would see them everywhere - the horizon line, a mountain range, water ripples. Following a line from source to end was one of the most alluring, and impossible, tasks when in nature. I still loved color just as much, but I wanted to add another layer to my ethereal colorfield-like works, although I wasn’t yet entirely sure what I wanted that layer to be. So, my next series was born. It was a brief series - I worked on it for less than a full year - directly related to the transition I was going through personally in this time. Everything seemed to be shifting within me, not just painting. I spent many months in solitude, doing deep, emotional work. I was changing, and as a result, my art was changing, too. I knew that whatever was on the other side of this transition was going to be well worth the awkward time I refer to as “growing pains”. This series is titled Find Your Line, in reference to two things: I added a new layer of organic lines that I found in nature, and it is also in reference to trying to find my path, to find my center as I evolved. To find my identity, my calling, in this life. To ask, genuinely seeking an answer: “What is my purpose as an artist?”. It was a deeply thoughtful time, and the exhibition of this work was titled The Existentialism of Color. This series was the essential stepping stone between my past and current work.

For My Love of Flowers is a full journey back home to myself, to the woman I never thought I would be. To the teenage girl who thought she would never have a beautiful life, and came to painting to feel less pain. I now paint to cultivate my joy. I deserve to be happy. I can now say that in total confidence, and it is my radical form of activism to do so. I no longer need to feel held by my work, as I was searching for in my Colorscapes series, but rather to find gratitude and new life within it. I finally decided that I no longer want to be a victim - in any facet of my life. I am no longer my tragedy, I am now a happy and hard working painter. An Artist who takes risks, and gives herself permission to change and be who she wants to be. I finally set out to do something I had been wanting to do since I very first started painting: to paint plants and flowers. I resisted this desire for many, many years - 100% because of contemporary art discourse that flowers have “already been done” throughout all of painting history.  Yes, flowers have been done, time and time again. But why does that have to matter? Why does the act of painting have to be something that has never been considered? I said I deserve to be happy: so if I want to paint the flowers, I am just going to paint the flowers! Enough with obsessive mental loops of what others may think, or if galleries don’t think I am “conceptual” enough for their liking. The act of painting is a celebration of my mere existence as a woman, my political voice to express my right to feel joy even amidst one of the most terrifying moments in my home nation’s history, that no one can take my life away from me. This is mine for the taking, and I am going to create what I want. And right now: I want to paint and illustrate colorful flowers and cacti. So I will.