Featured Artist: Jacklyn Laryea

I don’t think of myself as an exceptionally eloquent person. In fact, if you’ve ever had a conversation with me, you probably know that I tend not to think before I speak, and I always think out loud. Most of the time, I wish I could find better ways to communicate myself to other people. Art has always been like a conversation for me. It is the only forum in which I feel entirely free to express the way I feel about surroundings, my life, and the myriad of experiences that have made me who I am today. It is the way I make sense of my relationships with the people around me. I have had conversations with a brush and pencil that I could never fully express in words. My paintings, drawings and illustrations, to me, are not simply dots of color strategically placed on a canvas or blocks or graphite scratched onto paper. I look at each piece of artwork and remember the emotion behind the image, the on-going dialogue in the piece. Each one of these is a part of me, a reminder of a past experience, a feeling I always wanted to express to someone else but couldn’t, an on-going struggle or dialogue I have with myself. I sometimes get confused when people ask me what inspires me to paint or how I developed my ability to draw, because art to me is just an inherent, inseparable part of what makes me Jackie.