Neon Diaries is a visual metaphor - every artwork I create is born from a personal story, much like ink spilled in a private journal. But unlike hidden pages, my art lays bare my deepest thoughts for all to see. In Neon Diaries, she is surrounded by floating electric monitors. Each glowing screen reveals a distinct futuristic journal entry - a metaphor for the way all my artwork tells stories. And this piece, in particular, explains how I came to that style of creating.
Los Angeles was my cage at 32 - a hollowed-out wreck clawing through a divorce that carved me raw. I woke with too many teeth clenched, like I’d been chewing glass in my sleep. My insides screamed like a kid locked in a hot car. Fraud. Failure. Not enough. My digital canvases became battlegrounds - surreal fever dreams where I bled jagged truths too sharp for words. Not with brushes, but with wounds. Each piece a confession, a cracked map through my madness, glowing like a pulse in the dark.
Then life tore the frame apart. I was ripped from LA’s neon hum and dropped into the sweating, broken heart of Guatemala - a backwater hell that stank of sour earth and lost hope, where every alley felt like a trap. I’d crammed my life into a storage unit: grainy VHS tapes of birthdays and first loves, dog-eared photos from better days, my mother’s things - recipes scrawled on napkins, coffee-stained journals, Spanish textbooks laced with her penciled notes, like soft whispers trying to reach me. She was torn from me in my late 20s, taken in a violent, shattering way I still don’t speak about. Those scraps were my last hold on her.
Then came the call. A freak accident. A cruel twist. The unit - gone. Erased. Losing it was like watching her die again. In Guatemala, I was an uninvited permanent visitor, stranded in a language I didn’t speak, drowning in cheap whiskey and rage that burned like fever. Grief didn’t arrive like a poem. It came like a riot.
One night - half-drunk, half-dead - I cracked open a crate of dusty old laptops. And there she was. In the neon glow of a ‘98 digital piece, her smirk sliced through the dark like a knife. In a warped figure from ’99, I heard her humming - off-key, over a pan of burnt meatloaf. Every surreal pixel pulsed with her: the late-night talks while she meal-prepped, her laugh - loud, reckless, enough to light up a room. I’d been painting her all along. Not to escape the pain - but to keep her breathing.
Like this story, I can transform myself back in time without photos or videos - just by looking at an older piece of work. Neon Diaries expresses those ideas in an abstract, surreal way. Each screen, each image, each color is a timestamp burned in memory - a way back.
