I always feel a bit weird calling myself an artist. I’ve sold one or two small works in the past, but mostly I’ve kept my paintings. If it were up to me, I’d keep most of them, but I’ve been thinking about moving lately, and I might not be able to keep lugging around all of these canvases. So the time has come to sell them.
Wind Ma, The Island, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 12″ x 12″. Saatchi Art.
I’ve been slowly adding works to the inventory, but you should already see one or two paintings. There are also prints available for all of them, at relatively affordable prices, but it would be great if the actual paintings found a good home.
Wind Ma, Sunset at Citrus Crossing, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 6″ x 4″. Saatchi Art.
As you can see, I’m absolutely not a photorealistic painter! To me, that’s what photos are for, and part of why I love taking them. But I’m drawn to expressive/naive approaches, so you’ll see a lot of that in the gallery.
Wind Ma, Hunter’s Moon, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 6″ x 4″, TBA.
Wind Ma, Wild Hibiscus, 2023, acrylics on canvas, 16″ x 20″, Saatchi Art.
You can check out the full portfolio at saatchiart.com/windma. Would be grateful if you spread the word! If you’d like to know more about any such artwork, you can e-mail me at contact@windma.net.
Mirepoix. Crepes. Pain au chocolat. Opera Houses–these were all seemingly ubiquitous in my visit to San Francisco (near downtown, anyway). In Bush St alone I had the opportunity to see not one, but two French restaurants.
I was kind of in awe. The environs near Music City Hotel vaguely reminded me of a fateful Toulouse trip taken in July 2012, a few months before starting grad school. No lavender fields adorned the highways here, true–but the subtle symphony of French goods and culture was yet palpable.
Quite wondrously for me, as it turns out, there was an Alliance Française right next to the hostel! In fact, mon voyage Toulousain was possible thanks to an initial contact with the Alliance back in Puerto Rico. Having spent 3 weeks in Toulouse (with excursions to Carcassonne and Bordeaux) learning the language, I and several travel buddies would wander around, absorbing the sights and culture.
While in Toulouse, I happened to stay in a small hotel near a Carrefour, and so even a cursory visit to the supermarket over there was an enlightening experience. Naturally, the bakery section was a vault of baguettes and pain au chocolat, where I first sank my teeth into its croissant-y deliciousness. So of course, it was a treat to see it in your average Californian supermarket, along with baguettes and what we’d call “real bread” (I wish I’d bought more than one packet 😋).
But yes! Back to the point, being that there is an actual French community in San Francisco, which had first made its way to the region during the Prussian war of the 1870s. Many exiles supported Napoleon III, so aspects like the opera houses and the “Roman ruins” of the Palace of Fine Arts were likely inspired by Parisian aesthetics (and history, society, culture…) at the time. This history was gleaned thanks to the historical museum at the Alliance Française, where I also managed to get some pretty cool books like La Fortune des Rougon by Emile Zola and Le flaneur des deux rives by Guillaume Apollinaire (I’ve yet to see if there’s art criticism in this book!).
As a child, on lazy summer afternoons, I would sometimes idle around on the living room while my mom watched The Streets of San Francisco (starring Michael Douglas… who knew?).
I don’t remember much of the show itself, but the iconic cable cars shaped whatever understanding I had of San Francisco at the time. I knew I had to go someday to see them for myself.
Scene from The Streets of San Francisco (Intro) 🔝
… and I did! 😀
Those hills were steep but they were also great cardio. Imagine how determined you had to be as a detective in the 70s, traipsing about all these hills while investigating the crime du jour, but I digress.
Anywho, I managed to capture some other inklings of the city, some of which unwittingly became slightly referential to the intro of that show (others just vibe):
“Lorem Ipsum” LOL. 30 bucks but at least it was delicious.
The Bay Area Bridge… I did see the Golden Gate but I lapsed in photo-taking as I went through…
I recently got back to LA after a week in San Francisco. I’m not a very social person, so I can’t say that I made full use of the touristy experience by going to the slew of cool bars that I saw along the way, but I definitely had fun taking pictures and absorbing the vibe.
However, there was a ton to see and theoretically do. I stayed at a music-themed hostel in downtown which was pretty epic.
On a whim, I decided to check out a Bruce Lee Exhibition in nearby Chinatown, which turned out to be one of the best things I did in the entire trip. I posted some pics at Blue Sky, but essentially the exhibit highlighted Bruce Lee’s road to action stardom, along with his acumen as a thinker. Did you know Bruce Lee was a philosophy major? He actually devised his own martial arts style with its own philosophical principles, and understanding this is just as important as learning about his action roles (his overall story is phenomenal; if you’re in the area, I recommend that you check the exhibit out!)
Guide Jimmy Chinn explaining how Bruce Lee was essentially the real action star in The Green Hornet, but was severely underpaid. The movie Kato was essentially a bunch of Bruce Lee scenes spliced together, à la YouTube–the coolness ahead of its time in many ways 😂
The payroll showing how Bruce Lee earned $400 as Kato whereas everyone else was paid in thousands.
There was a gallery next to the Chinese Historical Society of America that had a solo exhibition by Dixon Ngai. Ngai worked with both porcelain and paint, and his work entails the feeling of longing and displacement caused by both being part of a diaspora and being LGBT.
Afterwards, I roamed a bit through Chinatown, then headed back to the hostel to recover for the next outing.
There’s way more where that came from but I’ll post about it next time!
Woke up today in the mood for a bit of doodling. I don’t consider myself a particularly good draughtsperson but I’ve also learned to grow fond of my style. The artistic journey is like that, I suppose: sometimes it’s not about transforming your style into something “better” but something that you learn to enjoy and see as your own.
Other times, it’s not the precision or the perfectionism of what you draw (or make, in general), but how you approach it that matters.
Take these roses, for example. They’re just sketches; they’re not meant to be masterpieces, and that is okay. More to the point, they are observations: five manifest observations of a rose, an object that we know from nature.
“A rose is a rose is a rose,” Gertrude Stein once said. The verse is evocative of the timeless and ever-present nature of an object, sans associations. We can think of a rose as part of a bouquet, part of a vase or part of a bush but it is first and foremost a rose. Alternatively, we can think of a rose and, with each enunciation, a different variety of one. The rose that I imagine the first time might not be the one that I imagine the next; the rose that first came to mind might not be the one that came to yours. So it is with roses, and everything else in nature.
A rose is a rose is a rose. Each rose captures a moment in thought, a moment of perception, a moment in time. No two roses are alike; in the mind, the rose becomes infused with the ink of mood and memory, if not the fragrance of time.
Went out for a walk the other day. And the dusk, as usual, masked the descent of another day into the horizon.
I love dusk. I love the liminality of it. The cool warmth; the warm coolness of the pavement as it exhales the toils of the day.
And yet, nostalgia seeps from marrow to bone. Walking through the city, following the simple to-and-fro of its indifferent rhythms, I wondered about what life could have been had different roads been taken.
While I’m grateful for where I am, I had plans and expectations–few if any have emerged to fruition. Old frustrations pulse beneath a scar that flares. I’ve been here seven years and neither one thing nor the other has actually happened, all the while surrounded by a system that never fails to tell me my dreams are not my own, my dreams are too big, or that the simple dream of surviving decently is too much to ask.
A system that insists on telling me where I need to stand, where I need to go and when I can speak (plot twist: up to them, never. The system demands silence while others appropriate my words)
Surrounded by glass and mirror the road itself seems so free.
Still I find ways to smile and take life as it comes. There is only one, after all. I intend to live it wherever I am.
Liminality is interesting. Neither in one place nor the other: life unfolds regardless, after the party ends.
So the day before yesterday, I went out to run a supermarket errand. A triumph, I know, considering the depth of this heat wave. But, go I did! Just a bit later than my usual afternoon outings; sometime nearer to dusk.
The air was still warm at seven-something when I left the supermarket—a Food 4 Less within LA’s Mayan Corridor, which is nearish to home. Anywho, I began my usual march back when I was struck motionless by the largesse of the moon.
What a sight!
Not only was I somewhat surprised by how large the moon was, but by how well the camera conveyed its scale. Anyone who has ever tried to take a picture of the moon knows how elusive the pursuit is; inevitably the lonely satellite dwarfs into the landscape, giggling in mischief all the while.
But for me, not this time! The photo fairy sprayed its pixel dust, and the moon appeared as I saw it.
Quite delighted with the sight, I continued the brisk promenade home, though not without stopping one last time for a photo:
Hypothesizing about the moon’s largesse, I figured that some important season must be upon us. A quick search reminded me of the partial eclipse, which would have been seen from North America yesterday, when I tried to see it (but the sky was overcast) and today (chance for attempt no. 2).
However, an eclipse alone does not necessarily explain the moon’s size. So what else could be amidst?
Turns out, that the full moon gracing us with her presence is actually a Sturgeon Moon, named so “because of the large number of sturgeon fish that were found in the Great Lakes in North America this time of year”, MSN says.
Wonderful! It’s amazing to think about how essential the moon was to ancient peoples (and really, not-so-ancient, as the enduring Farmer’s Almanac still attests). Ancient societies led their lives according to the moon’s phases, not only for agriculture but for navigation.
The topic of moon worship has been ever-present in mind these past few days, since a book for which I designed the cover and layout, Gauguin’sMatriarchy, was officially launched! 🎉 Briefly, the author visually analyzes the Tahitian-inspired paintings of Paul Gauguin from a Jungian perspective, which argues that human consciousness resembles the phases of the moon. Due to its connection with “feminine” ideals like birth, growth, and intuition, societies that honor the moon tend to be “matriarchal” in nature (as we know societies have been). Thus, the author argues, the amazon-like Tahitian women that populate Gauguin’s canvases reflect this underlying matriarchal nature in Polynesian society, stubbornly enduring despite its then-ongoing European assimilation.
At present, Gauguin’sMatriarchy is available as a hardcover only, through Amazon, but an e-book will become available sometime in the near future. If, like me, you’re not very good at remembering random Amazon URLs, you can visit the store at edicionesplumaverde.com/gauguin instead.
Hello friends! I hope you’ve been faring well. This heat wave has been killer. Like a cat, I can’t decide whether I prefer being outside or inside for the summer. As an introvert, my existing-at-home time is crucial, but it’s been hijacked by this steaming heat that makes outside being somewhat more tolerable.
But that’s not always a bad thing! In fact, it was a great thing a few days ago, when I turned—well, I turned a fabulous age 😉 My original plans got curtailed by life (as they naturally would), but I managed to pivot gracefully towards what turned out to be an amazing day at Santa Monica Beach 😀
To commemorate the occasion, I’m sharing some of my favorite pics from that snazzy event. Me, the gulls, the waves, the fabulous beachscape, the interesting people… good times!
Hello friends! I’m excited to share that our RedBubble wares are now better accessible through windma.shop, so update your bookmarks!
That being said, I’m happy to announce that I’ve been “hard at work” adding new designs to the shop. While I love the idea of my art existing as prints (some of which, by the way, can now be found at wind-ma.framer.art), it’s also really cool to see some of your art living a second life as a funky design. It reminds me of the 19th century Arts & Crafts ethos, which basically encouraged artful design as a way to imbue daily life with aesthetic meaning/appreciation.
Anywho! You can find a bevy of cool stuff over at windma.shop. Stickers and prints are, of course, cool and less expensive ways to display some of these artworks. However, I’m especially partial to notebooks, tote bags, cushions and backpacks—I think that this is where the designs really shine!
Also, if you’d like to help out and spread the word about windma.shop, I’d be most grateful! ☺️ Feel free to use the banner above to link to the shop (our guestbook is pending—but if you like what you see, drop a comment below).
