Painter Veronica Fernandez on finding your version of ambition

So your painting studio is upstairs in your house? How does that affect your process?

I make really big pieces, and when I sort of consolidated—I now have my studio upstairs, which is basically just a normal-sized bedroom—that’s actually what inspired me to make really small pieces. I never work small. For this show, I had to reteach myself how to make small pieces. So I was struggling a lot at first, because I was like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know how to make super small paintings,” and I wanted to challenge myself. But sometimes I’ll take a pillow and now I can work on my stomach in the living room. [*laughs*] And I have a mini easel, too, that I take around the house if I want to do something while I’m painting.

I feel like that’s an inversion of what you would expect. People usually find working bigger to be challenging and expanding. What are the challenges or the difficulties of learning how to work on a smaller scale?

Some of the figures in the works are literally the size of my finger or my pinky! Doing face details, doing the anatomy of the figures, doing clothing—any sort of detail—and just adding texture in general. Trying to learn how to use space properly and having to use really tiny brushes, and getting used to using a brush with a few hairs on it, as opposed to my big brushes where I could just be like, whoosh, put that everywhere, add movement everywhere… Because it’s just so tiny, I have to step back or I’ll get a headache.

Something different that I noticed, working smaller, was the use of color in general, and also not overworking the pieces. I only had limited space, so I didn’t feel the need to add something. When I was doing the small paintings, it’s kind of forced to be done. I mean, what else am I going to add? Not that I wasn’t intentional before, but I felt a lot more strict with being intentional about things, and leaving things out, and leaving open space where I can.

So some of the decisions are being made for you now, in a way?

Yeah. It feels like they’re these little trinkets almost, and I’m being very careful with them—being very careful with all the little details and how I paint the figures, and where I put emotion in the painting. It’s kind of just picking and choosing where the magic happens, where the psychology of the figures comes in, because it can’t just be everywhere. There’s no space for that.

When you’re sketching, are you usually starting with references, or are you going off the dome and improvising?

Depending on the painting, I’ll go straight off the dome. But usually, if I already know maybe something’s under the umbrella of a body of work already, I’ll have a few references of what I want to do. A lot of my sketchbooks are all full. When I start a painting officially, it’s usually two sketches that were combined, and that’s the idea. So my sketches aren’t necessarily for one painting. It’s mostly a bunch of different sketches of different things happening, and then they combine, sort of like layers like PhotoShop.

Can you give me an example of you using that process in the current show?

So I have this mini painting, and it’s a diptych. The painting’s called Before the Light Goes Out, and there’s just a kid standing there. He has a pot full of water, the roof is dripping… So the sketch was that kid looking through the door, and then a couch next to him with the pots, and then another sketch I had was this shelf with a cat jumping off of it, and things falling off the shelf.

The painting has the kid looking at the shelf and all these things are falling. It kind of just adds to the room, whereas before it was just a door that he was looking out at. Now there’s furniture in the room, there’s the shelf there, there’s movement there.

I noticed that there’s always motion and action happening in the paintings, or a sense that the scene you’re depicting is in between two other scenes. How often is that a conscious choice?

I feel like it’s more conscious for this show, because I’ve had some paintings where they felt so still and I looked back at them like, “This painting’s so stiff.” This body of work, it talks a lot about things changing over time, things fluctuating, a lot of different emotions and things happening at once. I try to add this sort of movement to set the tone for the piece.

You already talked about this a little bit, but how does a painting begin for you?

I have a folder called “references” on my phone and it’s full of old photos that my family members have sent me. In my studio, I have a giant stack of my own memorabilia, or objects that I appreciate. So I usually look at photographs and I’ll do the sketches in pieces, like I said, where I take one sketch and add another to it, or just try to do as much brainstorming as I can. And I also write. Those three different things will create a piece. I have a lot of poetry that I write, and sometimes I just look at the lines that I wrote or the different themes in the poetry, and that’ll set the mood for a piece and give me the idea of what reference I use.

Are you writing poems to finish them and have them be their own thing, or are you using poetry as a springboard for painting?

This is so silly, but I’m a little embarrassed about poetry. I think it’s because I just started and I’m not used to it. So it is very raw. I have some finished poetry that I have included once or twice in shows that I’ve done, but then I also have these pieces of poetry that are super quick or super long, and they’re just rambling thoughts, but I like them a lot. I’m just so… not ashamed, but I feel like I’m just scared, and get some sort of anxiety about them because I’m not used to them. So they are a very exciting part of the practice that contribute a lot, but they’re hidden.

Tell me a little bit about your day-to-day, your routine around art making. Are you pretty strict with your time? Are you structured? Are you a little bit more scrambly, sprawly?

I work really, really early, and I love working really, really late. I hate afternoon. I just feel like that’s a dead time. It gets really hot during the day, and I’m just confused. [*laughs*] So during the afternoon, I kind of wander around. But when I wake up, I always make sure that I at least start by 8:00, and so I’m getting ready by 7:00, getting my food together. All the background noise gets set up for exactly 8:00.

From there I usually only pause for meals or for contacting people, and then I kind of work until night. I just love working until, like, 12 or 1. I wish I could pull all-nighters. I can’t anymore. I did it too much in college, and now I feel like I might die if I do it again.

You weren’t getting started at 8:00 in the morning then, were you?

No, I was! I used to stay over at my school, because I was a commuter and they let you have your own studio during your thesis. So I had crusty eyes, just waking up. I’m like, “Okay, go home to shower, come back from Jersey to New York.”

Have you always worked long hours?

Yeah! I didn’t start painting until college; I didn’t know oil painting existed until I became a student in college. My school and my upbringing, I didn’t even know you could be an artist. I thought all the artists were all dead and we just saw their work in museums.

I got to college, I learned how to oil paint, and that’s when I started painting. From there, I just worked nonstop all day, every day—when I could, because the materials were expensive. But I worked at the school, so I was able to get people’s scraps. Leftover canvases international students threw out, or oil paint they threw out, and so forth.

Do you have periods where you rest and don’t work?

Yeah, someone told me once, it’s called the post-show blues. So sometimes that’s my rest time, when I finally met that deadline and pressure and I’ve almost exhausted myself. That’s when I start doing a lot more poetry and a lot more sketching, and I don’t work on a painting at all. When I want to get back to work and I have severe “art block,” what I end up doing is I’ll have a bunch of canvases and I’ll just paint them all different colors and see which one excites me the most, and just sort of go painting-hopping, and then work on the one that I’m the least bored with until I get a groove again.

I’m curious about your approach to working with the raw material of memory, or memorabilia, things from your past. You’re not just painting it in a photorealistic way, you’re playing with it creatively. How do you think about it?

I actually have every card anyone’s ever given me; I never throw a card away. I love rereading them and keeping them in mind for my words and keeping in mind the connection I have to that person, kind of pocketing these emotions. When I start a piece, when I think about the tone I want to set, I always turn back to cards or advice I get from family members or old photographs. I’ll have this page in my sketchbook that looks like columns of lists, and it’s all almost titles or sayings or advice someone has given me, or a sentence a family member said that I thought was interesting or special. I’ll take those things and I’ll add it to the work at some point or let it be a catalyst.

Do you find that the emotion is there from the beginning and you are just clarifying it, or does it evolves as you work on it?

It evolves as I work on it. A lot of works in the new show are all kids or families in motel rooms, going through different circumstances. I feel like that’s all evolved over the past year, and doing this show was [about] working with my own personal memories and thinking about my circumstances that I’ve gone through in my life.

There’s this gas station painting and the woman’s holding her kid. I don’t know if you saw that piece [Highway Laundry]. Basically, this woman has her kid piggybacked on her, and then her other kid has laundry, and they’re walking past this Denny’s and this vagabond motel. There’s a guy on the floor who’s homeless, and there’s a bunch of garbage on the floor, and all those little elements that I add to make it more realistic. Those are all things where I’m like, “Oh, my family had to walk down the highway with all these laundry baskets, because we didn’t have a laundry near us.” All those little details I add from different memories and points in time to make it feel more present and more open-ended for the viewer who sees it, so they’ll think about, “Oh, what kind of environment is this person in and why are they there?”

Totally. There are broader stories and systems at play. They’re not flat scenes, they’re very dynamic scenes. Could you tell me more about the Ignite the Hearts Foundation that you work with and how that is connected to your art practice?

When we were younger, my dad was struggling a lot and we lived in a shelter, but when we got out of that transitional housing, we lived in this small apartment. For years, up until my sister and I took over, my dad would always give out food vouchers for people and have these boxes where he filled it with Thanksgiving dinners and so forth, and would give it out to families. It’s his way of paying it forward. He instilled it in us, and even at a young age, I was decorating the boxes, because I was the art one. And so my sister and I, every year, basically take over that sort of tradition in our family. We look up any shelters with families. We work with nonprofits on Skid Row. What do they need and what can we collect and how can we get our neighbors to help us get all these things? How do we get the community together to make it happen for these people? What do you need? Let’s make it happen. And so Ignite the Hearts—my dad named it—is just my family. Me, my dad, my brother, my sister. Basically, we just help anyone that needs us.

When it comes to that tying into the work, I was living in Sylmar in San Fernando Valley, and down the street from me was the motel that’s in a lot of these pieces, a vagabond motel. Every day I would see this line of kids waiting for school outside the motel. It just struck a lot of emotion in me, because when I was younger, I did the same thing: I would take a bus from the shelter to my school, because I lived in another town, and that was the school I went to. I wasn’t sure why I lived in a different place and why I was going to school in a different place, and I found out that motel was full of families that were living there that were in a transitional phase. All their lives of where they were before are packed into this room. When I was doing this show, I thought about how to evoke this feeling in the works: this suffocating, curious feeling about what it’s like to have your life in this space, because I’ve been there before. I was thinking about it for a while, and I knew what I was going to call the show and what I wanted to incorporate, but I didn’t know what I was going to paint.

I get the clear sense of an insider perspective on these scenes. I get the sense of you relating to these sort of outsider subjects. Is that also something that you’re trying to represent?

Yeah. One thing I really struggle with, as an artist, is imposter syndrome. I grew up not knowing about art. When you grow up poor, you don’t know about a lot of things, and when you get into the art world, you realize a lot of artists have access to so much. Maybe their parents have collections, or maybe they knew about art from an early age—which is great for them, not knocking that—but I struggled a lot. When I make pieces, and when they’re personal and I have to express them, I’m able to. But sometimes it makes you feel very vulnerable. It’s something that I want to express because I want people to see the places that are being highlighted in the works, and the little feelings and little details that are being highlighted in the works about an everyday life that may be overlooked at times.

I’ve always told my friends, sometimes I feel like I was born five feet under everybody else, where you feel like you’re always playing catch up. Even a lot of my family members, all the adults that I know, they’re still playing catch up. They feel like they don’t have the things they want at the age they are, or they feel like on the outside. I feel like that’s why being an artist feels so unreal, because it’s not something that I thought I could become. I’m Latina and I want to be an artist, and I want to be able to express myself, but there’s this weird feeling where I’m like, “Oh, should I be doing this? Should I be doing something else to support my family more, to support myself more?”

Luckily, I come from a family where my dad has always pushed me to do what I want to do, regardless of what the risks are. But I still feel like I’m putting myself in a very vulnerable state… But maybe that’s just how it is. It’s okay. I don’t want to always feel comfortable where I am because my upbringing was uncomfortable. Nothing’s comfortable. [*laughs*]

Everyone suffers and everybody has obstacles that they have to overcome, and it’s both awful and beautiful.

Yeah! It’s so weird too. I feel like when I finally started going to school, I was blown away just seeing an art museum. Contemporary art was just the weirdest, coolest shit ever. I was like, “What the fuck is going on? Where has this been? Where has the culture been?”

It sounds like you’ve been able to keep in touch with that feeling of loving it and caring about it without it getting stale. Is there a secret to that?

I think you have to find ways to keep yourself motivated and ambitious. I’ve always been the type of person that I’m like, “Oh, I have to do this and I have to do that and I have to do this. I have to try to do it.” I’d rather try and fail than not try at all. I think you have to try your best to find your version of how to be ambitious, and you know that there’s a bunch of people doing the same medium as you, and maybe people make similar paintings to you, but you have to keep loving what you do—what your version of that is.

People always ask me, “Why are you so motivated all the time?” It’s not just because I’m making a career out of it. I’ve also had years where I’m not the most wanted artist on earth and I can’t make money off of it, whatever. That’s not the sole motivation. It’s having to motivate yourself and find it interesting. Don’t let the fire die out. Feed it. Put gasoline on it.

That’s a good final quote I think.

Put gasoline on that shit!

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Tyler Bussey.