Erika Alonso
Houston, Texas
Erika Alonso is an unabashedly painterly painter living and working in Houston, Texas.
MessageErika Alonso (b. 1987) is a Cuban-American painter, working and living in Houston, Texas. Her childhood was spent in Southern California, a place she often “escapes” to while painting. Alonso is a self-taught artist and an unabashedly painterly painter. Her current makings involve experimenting in abstract expressionism through a series of whimsical, abstract-figurative-landscape paintings that are meant to capture a moment in all of its fleetingness—the movement and rush and whirl of it.
The artist describes her work as an escape from reality: “My paintings are just places I’d like to spend my time. Places that are pleasantly stimulating, enchanting, complex, and consistently inconsistent.”
And in a way, they are where the artist spends most of her time—painting in her studio on Winter Street. Alonso likens her painting process to daydreaming, and the painting itself to a vessel through which the viewer can travel into the snapshots in her mind. Her faith in the process comes across in her use of color with abandon, which the artist attributes to her confidence that the act of painting is something that is driven by the still place just below the surface of her conscious thoughts, which she has learned to dip into through repetition and physical and mental calibration: “You can’t control what you are doing, and you don’t know where you are going, but you just do it again and again until the knowledge is in the muscles and the bones, not the brain. The brain has better things to do; no time for instruction—only vision!”
Alonso’s main influences can be seen plainly in her work: Willem DeKooning in her use of charcoal and blending of unconventional materials, as well as his idea of a “slipping glimpser”, and Cecily Brown in her fractured brushstrokes. Other influences include painters Joan Mitchell and Larry Poons; illustrator Ralph Steadman; and musician-storytellers such as Beck and Nick Cave.
Despite her proclivity for art at a young age, Alonso had relatively few interactions with art in her childhood and adolescence. Her parents were not interested in art and favored more practical professional pursuits. But she remembers the moment that the creative world opened up to her, when she found a painting left behind by the previous owner in the garage of her childhood home. That picture, remembered as a pen and wash style landscape, was the only painting she lived with as a child, and fragments of it endure in her memory to this day.
Alonso’s series of whimsical and intimate watercolor paintings from 2019 were at the outset an experimental effort to “find” that very painting as a visual memory to be replicated. While not successful in terms of creating a replica, Alonso achieved something greater along the way: her own style, with its distinct mark-making and approach to mediating the materials and process, rather than controlling or directing them. In late 2019 / early 2020, the artist created a series of “tiny ink drawings” which highlight her unique marks and intuitive sense of form. The series, which embraces the artist’s powerful sense of spontaneity and includes over one hundred 7.5” x 5.5” drawings, was created over the course of just 2 months.
In addition to her works on paper, Alonso is currently working on large-scale acrylic paintings on canvas and handmade cradled wood panels. In this series, she is exploring color and further defining her own visual language: a watchful eye in the sky, windows as escape hatches, reflection pools, cascading flowers (that are also people), along with birds, snakes, and animals of all kinds.
Alonso’s fantastical paintings and drawings have been exhibited throughout the Houston area and in group shows at Lawndale Arts Center, Winter Street Studios, Archway Gallery, and Foltz Fine Art Gallery.
Statement
My paintings offer a glimpse into my inner-world, full of creatures and beings and feelings as lines and shapes and color. My process starts with no intentions, no goal, no specific inspiration—only emotion infused with energy. I paint quickly and all at once—chasing a glimpse of something in the paint and charcoal or ink, I am always just about to lose my train of thought. This aspect of my process—painting intuitively—comes through to the viewer, as figures emerge and then recede only to appear again, perhaps slightly different than before. What results finds comfort at the interstices between abstraction and figuration: painterly swirls of color, lyrical lines, a watchful eye in the sky, windows as escape hatches, reflection pools, cascading flowers (that are also people), birds, snakes, and animals of all kinds.
© 2023 Erika Alonso