Brief Description: My Mappa Mundi of Mapanare, Venezuela painting, deals with the personal story of migration influenced by political sanctions, and of a country that’s changed completely. I have drawn numerous sketches from photographs of our life in the seventies and eighties in Mapanare from the family album, research of history, and photographs that are incorporated in the narrative of the painting. Embedded in the painting is a handwritten poem of my mother that she had written about her feelings when she had first immigrated to Venezuela in the seventies. This painting is personal, but it has a universal context of migration and how borders discount the natural flow of living beings—both human and non-human. While human movement is restricted by political entities, migratory creatures like birds (in the painting Garza/Heron) traverse vast distances with no regard for the lines drawn on our maps. The maps in the painting are taken from Google Earth.
Details:
This painting is personal but it has a universal context of how we, human migrants, might never be able to return to the countries we have called home because of borders, politics, but the birds ( in the painting Garza/Heron) are free to migrate between my current homeland USA, and the country of my childhood.
My Mappa Mundi of Mapanare, I remember through my pixelated memory, a country that’s changed completely. The little town I grew up in is gone, reclaimed by trees. I try to portray Stories, Folklore, History of my childhood home at the confluence of the Orinoco and Caroni.
This painting was made in grief over the loss of my mother. She had lived a beautiful life, traveling across the globe. She had moved around a lot with my father and later with her children. So, her last year when she got very sick, she wanted us to take her Home, for she desired to breathe her last breaths in her “Home”, which she dearly missed all these years. Her Home was Kolkata, India.
In this painting, I have incorporated her handwritten poem that she had written about her feelings when she had first immigrated to Venezuela in the seventies. I have drawn numerous sketches from photographs of our life in the seventies and eighties in Mapanare from the family album, research of histories that are incorporated in the narrative of the painting. The painting is 48” by 36” mixed media.
