VIANDAS

VIANDAS

I’ve always been drawn to observational drawing and painting.

Sitting quietly with a subject and studying it over an extended period of time is the closest thing to meditation in my artistic practice. Whether I’m painting a person or an object, the process demands sustained attention. The longer I look, the more I begin to notice.

For this painting, I deliberately chose viandas—Puerto Rican root vegetables. They carry deep cultural significance, but I was equally interested in their physical presence: their textures, irregular forms, worn skins, subtle shifts in color, and the way they rest together, much like they do when prepared on a plate. I wanted to enlarge that experience, inviting the viewer to look more closely and enter a world that often goes unnoticed.

A recent trip back to Puerto Rico heightened that awareness.

Everywhere I looked, I encountered these foods again: growing in yards, stacked in roadside stands, and sold by neighborhood vendors. The island sharpened my senses. I found myself paying closer attention to the colors, textures, sounds, and rhythms of everyday life.

When I think about the essence of Puerto Rican culture, I often think of the jíbaro farmer harvesting yuca or ñame, hands in the soil, guided by generations of knowledge passed down through lived experience. That history is present in these humble foods, even if we don’t always stop to consider it.

The viandas also began to suggest something larger to me. Their histories do not all begin in the same place. Some connect to the Indigenous Caribbean and foods cultivated on the island long before colonization, while others carry histories that reach across the Atlantic to Africa. Over generations, these different traditions became intertwined within Puerto Rican foodways and everyday life.

Seen together, the viandas become a metaphor for Puerto Rico itself. Different histories and points of origin share the same soil, the same pot, the same plate. Over time, they become part of something distinctly Puerto Rican. I’m less interested in separating those histories than in recognizing how they exist together—how something as familiar as a plate of viandas can quietly contain traces of migration, survival, adaptation, and cultural exchange.

For me, VIANDAS exists somewhere between observation and cultural memory. It is a painting about looking closely, but also about recognizing that even the most familiar objects can carry histories far deeper than their everyday appearance suggests.