First post in my new blog…yikes. What now? I’m feeling a little bit wordless. I’m just going to start writing. I’m just going to tell you, like I would tell a new friend why did I start painting and all of that good stuff. So, I started painting when I was about 9 I guess, inspired by my dad who is a pretty good self taught painter, I was not very disciplined of course, but I pretty much figured out back then that I wanted to be a painter.
Fast forward hmmm, lets say, 10 years. There I was, a student in Universidad de Costa Rica, second year in art school, first year in painting class, “Painting 1” . Teacher says, for our first serious project: “Pick a subject that you are very interested in”. Well, Carolina Coto’s pick? (I’ll like to make a little parenthesis here and ask you to go look at my portfolio on this blog and guess what subject I picked -if you’re familiar with my art, then jump right to the subject guessing :) – rainbows? flowers? color, color, color?) The Holocaust. That was my pick. Yes. From age 16th to about 21 I was very, very interested, shocked, obsessed in an existential “how-in-this-world-could’ve-something-like-this-happened” way. And so I immersed my self into it, read, read and read more (more than I had already read in the past 4 years about it) and dreamed, yes, I possibly dreamed every other night about it. The art work resulting was very intense, very heart felt and it was very very dark. And it got me a 10 in that class that semester. The rest of my student years were filled with very introspective and exhaustingly emotional work. Fast forward to 2008. My current line of work started. What happened in between? A lot of experimentation I guess, life experiences, growing up. I came to terms with a lot of things that I needed to paint about in early years, and “digging” in my “soul” just became unnecessary and almost annoying to me. A lot of my younger years’ art where about self discovery, and then at some point I did not feel like I needed to do that anymore. The result is my current work. “Happy art” people call it, and that’s perfectly fine with me. I’ve felt self conscious about my current line of work, sometimes. I wonder if it has the necessary “depth” to it, -conceptual depth I mean-, but all I know is that I am painting what I really want to paint. My art work now is the most honest, comfortable, “happy” (I guess I use that word to describe it, too) that I’ve ever painted, and I guess that’s all that matters for me right now. One’s art is always evolving, so I’m sure there will be changes in it. But I feel I’m painting and I am creating right now what I want and what I need.
Phewww. There. My first blog post. Thanks so much for reading and I’ll see y’all next time :)
Disclaimer: English is not my first language. I apologize for all the funny grammar errors I might have made ;)
Carolina Coto Art 