“I was born on February 20, 1978, the elder of two sisters and a brother in a small and traditional family. I was born with two legs, one in the puertorican, latin and traditional culture, and the other influenced by the American, Anglo-saxon, and impersonal culture; determined by the political and contradictory status of my country.
I grew up in Aguada, Puerto Rico, in a small wooden house… house who is still present today in my dreams, pieces of my childhood.
I can’t say that I was born with a pencil in the hand, but I remember that I always loved to draw. My childhood was happy, magic, probably for the fact of living in a palm grove, in a slightly populated neighborhood, like far from the world and quite close of the sea. There I learned to invent games and histories together with my sisters and cousins, to imagine that the stones were alive like animals and that they can be pets. I learned to dream when I was awake.
When I started primary school, everything changed. People made me believe that I was different, strange, because I preffer to draw than to play with dolls, strange because I had two iguanas and a turtle as pets, because I love history… I turned into a shy and reserved young woman, very silent always. Then my family was broked because of the drug and the alcohol, and we lived times of fear, of poverty… time that lasted long years. Drawing and painting were always my refuge.
Casually, I had the opportunity to travel to Panama, Kuna Yala and then to the Peruvian Amazon, where I was going for three months and rested almost three years. I lived also in Oaxaca, Mexico… I was very impressed by the colors, the people, the Latin identity and the humanity that I found in all these countries. Now I live in Bretagne, after having lived a time in the south of France.
My painting can be a search of identity, a mirror of my feelings, a reaction in front of everything that happen in our society today, and an intimate part of my personal history. Every painting has a history, a symbolism.
I am self-taught, my school till now has been the world itself and the life that I have had.”
Alejandra Baiz
