Grace

We just started the new month of March!!! It's a very special month because we celebrate women, we all women of the world, and really, it should be every single day!!! So I thought to write some words about my African Goddess: I would like to honor my Mother in my very first post, in this new month of women's celebration.
My Mother is all the colors in the rainbow for me, all the colors I use in my Art, all the colors I mix, all the colors I am searching for on my palette.
My Mother and I have woven different stories in our lives, in coming and going in wave motions, in huge sea waves, in white silvery foams, in very still and silent waters, in endless ocean horizons. We have been through so much, just like any daughter-mother relationship can take any woman through.
A couple of years ago, I tried to capture the esence of my Mother in a large charcoal drawing called ''Meditación XIII - Océanos de las Generaciones Perdidas'' (13th Meditation - Oceans of Lost Generations), and till today I can give to anyone the explanation of this work of art. In today's blog, I am only showing the section where my Mother appears, around her thirties, just like me today, a picture longtime taken by my father when they met in Burkina Faso I believe. The art piece a really big, including 3 drawings: my Mother, a child with tears in the middle, and the bottom part an African young girl. At the end of the Ormolú Exhibition back in 2012, the whole piece ended up being divided by 3, for 3 different persons who agreed to take each one drawing. It was usual from my part to accept this deal, as for originally, the whole peice made sense to me, and cutting each drawing ''destroyed' the artwork as a whole. But it is said that once the artist create a piece, one must let it fly freely to the world...
In the art piece as a whole, I wanted to stransmit the beauty of my Mother: I was having a deep desire to play around with her darkness, her black skin, her big black and curly hair, all the rich qualities I came to admire and accept about my Mother. She has always been a very strong and powerful woman to me, all throughout my life, and I think to ayone who would cross path with her. She was so powerful, with a huge intelectual capacity, that very often she would intimidate me, or any one else. She often acted way out to extremities, when she disliked or disaproved of something.
But on another deeper level, I wanted to transmit her softeness, her delicacy, her fierce feminity. She was so beautiful to me, to a larger extent that her anger or sometimes unfairness could be seen or be part of her beauty. My Mother has always been a very generous woman: she helped and gave so much to anyone who needed her attention. This quality of hers often drove her to betrayels and disappointments in her many relations or friendships, and because she had put so much love and care into whichever 'giving,' when things turned as it was unexpected for her, she would end 'forever.' My Mother often told me that she felt alone in this world, unable to trust anyone, and on some level, I believe that she has put so many goals to climb and achieve for herself, thinking and forced to do them alone, that she has been unabled to believe in the love and admiration that others truly feel for her.
In turn, the little boy in the middle of the artpiece as a whole is on some level a portrait of myself. It is a representation of hunger, or suffering, of time passing without really knowing what is the real need and fulfilment in my life. He is in tears, as often as I find myelf. I know the little boys is under a real pressure of suffering, his reality, which I am not, but he is a metaphore of the feelings I have many times when I relate myslef with my Mother. Feelings of being unable to be the person she wants me to be, and instead, staying in the same static and yet so complicated and viscious cycle of being a 'victim.' In the same line, I want to clear up that as the artist, I am not asking the audience to take me or the boy as a victim, instead, as the boy is composed of a straight forward deep gaze to the viewer, my eyes, my gaze, I am actually 'begging' the viewer to really ask and raise questions in him or herself.
More could be discussed about the whole drawing, but at least, I would like to share my thoughts about the last part of the artpiece as a whole. It is a portrait of a little oborigen girl from a place in Africa, which forgive me if I am unble to geograpgically specify. But in any case, as in general, this little girl to me represents the African continent, the African people, the deepest and oldest history, and the reason for this is basically because of the shape of her head. For me, it it the Evolucion of Human kind to some extremities. I deduct that she must come from a region near the Nile river, where it is said and believed that the beginning of the Human race began. The relation of this little girl to the art peice as a whole is again the same thread that my Mother carries. I have always felt that somehow my Mother carries an ancient soul, and I cannot demonstrate it, for it has always been a deep intuitive feeling inside of me. But at the same time, my Mother cares so much about the World, she involves herself so much politically and intelectually, that to me, it feels that her life is all about the Human race, about the others, defending others and especially the Africans and Black Americans. To me, she is the root, the African earth, struggling to protect, to cherich and love, facing and confronting the changes of the world. She thought I could be her or be like her, and on so many levels, she was unable to see that I was of a another generation. That I couldn't be of her generation, because I hadn't lived what she had lived, all through the storm of racism and sexism she rode against. I think that till the very end, she will want to delagate her world, her past world, her lost generation. I know there are so many issues still in this world, of racism, or sexism, violence, poverty, wars and all kinds of fuckedup ways of living, and I don't want to say that I have never been under pressure of any of these human conditions. Yes, we are all humans, and we all do good and bad, and we are all submitted to unfairness and iqualities. But 
I have been anabled to be like my Mother, to have lived her generation, and part of me has felt inferior and week, and has been so sorry and in urge for asking for forgiveness.
Obviously, there is so much more to explain and share, but still, in hopes of just raising questions at least. So, this is why, for this month, I only want to stay with the following image of my Mother, which just in the inside of her, she contains so many different worlds to me, a boxfull of life treasures-- it is amazing to me that with all that we have lived together, can be seen to me as part of my mother's beauty. 
I repeatedly open her box over and over again and many times, I cannot find the answers, and I am left with tears and so many different emotions, feeling embalmed with rays of warm love and many times as well, I open it and little blue butterflies fly hurriedly to my face and gently flutter my skin--this is how my Mother is, literally. But with time, I try to accept, that this is just IS, is for being a mother, or a daughter... being a Woman radiating love.
For my very first blogpost, I am hoping you have enjoyed my words, and I want to thank you for reading me, and dedicate me a little of your life time. And at the very least, if not enjoyed (for now it happens to me that I must translate my Spanigh mind into English, it used to be first the other way around).... maybe you have enjoyed seeing the beautiful charcoal drawing of my Mother... Many things I would do differently to the drawing today, but back then, this is the way I imagined on doing her.