control freak...

Power: the ability to compel obedience regardless of opposition...

As a child you realize pretty soon that your ability to chart your own course and make your own decisions is severely limited by parents and teachers followed by elders and then society at large. Your ability to define the "possible" is largely determined before you are born and is informed by your peers, associates, and the norms of your immediate environment.  We were told by parents to whom not even English was a Second Language to strive to become doctors and astronauts without any road map on how to obtain those dreams. So I learned at an early age to take control of life and be forceful in my actions but not in the way some of my friends did by joining the Army and being all they could be by filling inner-city recruiting quotas but with a pen and later graduating to a brush and canvases. 

I learned from an early age you can will things into existence. In my sketchbook my parents never divorced and my great-grandmother Mamá is still alive in the kitchen adding love to all the masterpieces that ever came out of those pots. As far as me, I have been a conquistador, a doctor, NBA player, pimp, Diego Rivera, Puerto Rican Patriot, Taíno Indian, and yes even a woman. I have lived across different time periods, observed Hannibal's battle at Carthage, saw Columbus wash ashore in the Dominican Republic in 1493 and proceeded to deny him access as an illegal immigrant without the proper paperwork, and served as main liaison between the Dutch and the Lenape Indians, informing them that 24 dollars worth of glass and beads was a joke for their precious Manna-hata island. I have done alot in my lifetime and all before I had even finished my Bachelors degree.

I got this idea after learning that Michaelangelo used his aunt, uncle, nieces and nephews when painting religious figures onto the Sistine Chapel as did most artists of the Renaissance. Of course Jesus and any of the other saints or biblical figures my grandmother spend all her life praying to, would never look like me. They were images of a 16th century Italian family not some Middle East man from Palestine circa 2000 years ago. That's when I learned of the power of art to re-write perceptions and boldly challenge established truths. When I learned from medical records that by the time Napoleon ascended to French throne he was vastly overweight and could not have possibly look like his imperial portrait by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, I knew that merely painting what I saw rather than what I desired what quite a mental box I had trapped myself in. But instead of trying to rewrite whole histories of entire countries I have merely tried to reconstruct my past and reconcile with it's ghosts on better terms.

Art is not a part of life, it is not an addition to life, it is the essence of those pieces of us that make us fulfilled. That give us hope. That give us dreams and provide the world a view very different than what it would have been without us. Art is the enemy of the routine, the mechanical and the humdrum. It stops us in our tracks with a high voltage jolt of disturbance; it reminds us of what humanity can do beyond the daily grind. It takes us places we had never dreamed of going; it makes us look again at what we had taken for granted. That innocent looking crayon in my hand is not merely a stick of paraffin wax, it is a key to the locked doors of a restrained imagination; a stick of dynamite to the chains of reality that attempt to define my being. 

I look forward to that arroz con salchicha for dinner later Mamá, I know it will be done as soon as the paint on the rice drys...