Latina artist sees nature as a muse and encourages young artists to embrace creative freedom
Driving past a field, you can sometimes see the grasses shimmering as the wind brushes through them.
“It’s that feeling of the memory,” rather than the exact replica, that inspires Maria De Los Angeles in her artwork, she said on a sunny Friday in late March sitting on a park bench at Jack London State Historic Park in Glen Ellen.
The idyllic state park was the setting of two day-long workshops led by De Los Angeles, which focused on watercolor painting inspired by the park’s natural beauty.
For the artist, the workshop attendees and park directors, it was a special opportunity to connect with other artists of all levels, get outside and let nature stir artistic creativity.
De Los Angeles, a renowned multidisciplinary artist born in Michoacán, Mexico, moved to Santa Rosa at age 11. She attended Lawrence Cook Middle School, graduated from Santa Rosa High and then attended Santa Rosa Junior College to earn her associate degree in arts in 2010.
She spent her college summers selling art and applying for scholarships to afford tuition at Pratt Institute in New York City, where she received her bachelor of fine arts degree in painting in 2013, then a master of fine arts degree in painting and printmaking in 2015 from Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut.
Now, De Los Angeles is based in New York teaching fine art at Pratt Institute and Fashion Institute of Technology. She comes back to Sonoma County regularly to lead workshops, paint murals, participate in exhibits and visit family.
“Don’t be afraid. We have so much paper ― you can do whatever you want,” De Los Angeles said to two high school students, Marisol Álvarez-Diaz and Maria Dalarkiaris, who sat around a koi pond in the garden at Jack London’s ranch using gouache paint, an opaque variation of watercolor paint, to outline the palm trees, the horizon line and the pond as birds chirped overhead.
"I feel relaxed and just at peace,“ Álvarez-Diaz said, in a hushed calm tone. ”Junior year is really stressful. I haven’t been this calm in a long time.”
The two friends attained scholarships from the park to attend the workshop.
“I felt this opportunity was something extraordinary,” said Álvarez-Diaz’s school mentor, Francie Ward, who had helped the two friends apply for a scholarship from the park. “This was perfect for (Álvarez-Diaz) because of her passion to be an advocate like Maria and her friend Maria (Dalarkiaris) is passionate about art.”
Other attendees at the workshop were also enjoying taking a break from everyday life and being present in the ethereal historic garden as they painted and received encouraging guidance from De Los Angeles.
Patricia Frates, a retired Sonoma resident, was using her fingers to paint a bright bouquet of flowers.
“It’s nice to let the creative mind out of its cage,” Frates said. “It gets to be too locked up,” she said as she dabbed some neon pink paint onto her canvas, “and it’s nice to get away from everything.”
Expression of self and memories
For De Los Angeles, art is about “capturing the memory,” she said at the workshop, where she sported a colorful Nirvana shirt, thick tortoise shell glasses, a jean jacket with lots of patches and patterned jeans.
“I think it’s this subconscious feeling that’s most important,” she said after encouraging the students to pay attention to the way the lights reflected off the plants and features in the park.
De Los Angeles’s art often captures that feeling, as seen in her vibrant murals across the county, including two murals in Glen Ellen, a mural at the Petaluma Health Center and an in-progress mural in the main-floor elevator that is part of the expansion of Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital, as well as an upcoming mural at Santa Rosa Junior College.
When she’s mentoring her students, De Los Angeles said she focuses on building a relationship with them so they can feel comfortable exploring different materials and mediums. She tries to encourage them to feel OK when things don’t go their way, like mixing the wrong color or an unintentional brushstroke.
“When we’re children we have so much freedom, but as we get older, anxiety tells us too many things so you have to forget some of them,” De Los Angeles said.
Instead she coaches artists on “just letting it happen.” Then eventually everybody feels comfortable and confident in themselves “because that’s what’s most important,” she said. “Nobody can really teach you that.”
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