The story behind

I can say that this was my very first digital painting. I took a Digital Painting class for a couple of months in 2013 at an Art Studio in Montreal, Canada. Even though it was a great class, I feel I didn’t take full advantage. I was working full time, volunteering, and wasn’t taking art seriously. It takes years of practice to get good at something, and I wasn’t ready to put in the time. This painting is an homage to where I grew up. A little town called Barrancabermeja in Colombia where oil is produced. I grew up next to an oil refinery for the first 16 years of my life.

I wanted to share here some of the iteration process to get to a place where I felt the painting was done. Composition is more than putting things together; anything that you want to put, ideally should make sense. Sometimes you start a painting using references that inspire you. For a while, I felt that I could see a section was very close to a reference I used, and that bothered me.

After finishing the first iteration for the class, I didn’t work on it for a couple more years. In 2021, after creating a few other digital paintings, I gained a bit more skills. I felt the call to revisit this painting and do a final round of improvements. As I keep going through my art journey, I’m noticing that I’m going to feel that some art pieces will always need more work. It’s a conscious choice to realize that the piece doesn’t need to be perfect but it needs to be let go.