Today marks the launch of my Island Spring Collection, and I'm over the moon. I have been thinking of launching a merchandize shop since 2018, and finally, I did it! Just like I tell my wonderful clients in my Dream Retreat, "never lose sight of your dreams, stick to the plan even if it takes longer than expected, don't give up!" Well.... I'm glad I followed my own advice! ![]() Spring is a time of birth, bloom and burst of colors . It is a time when we begin again to enjoy the warm outdoors, spend a day at the beach and refresh by the nearest pool. The artwork I used for the collection was the first of the series From isla to island, and conveys the eternal horizon of time, colors and life. It is inspired by the many horizons I have experienced in time-space from my native island of Cuba, to my current place of residence, Shelter Island, N.Y. It is a window into the "beyond" time, a circular forever. The Island Spring Collection is about renewal, eternity, life, and most importantly, love. It is my hope that each of my shop offerings fills you with vibrant energy and reminds you that life is full of wonder and magic and to go after your dreams ..... no matter what!. With love, AMO
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As I have shared in previous blog posts, I pay serious attention to my dreams. As a child, I was a lucid dreamer as well as a daydreamer. My Mom, to this day, when I get contemplative says to me... "you are in dreamworld again." Although I still have very vivid dreams, they aren't as lucid. I still, however, dream in color, I can hear sounds, feel, and every so often, control my motion and direction in them. My favorite dreams are flying dreams. The ones I pay close attention to are the ones with symbols, which according to psychologist Carl Jung, belong in "the sphere of unconscious mythology whose primordial image are the common heritage of mankind.... the collective unconscious." In one of those symbol dreams, I was walking on a wide beach when looked down and saw a serpent eating its tail drawn in the sand. It was huge, and I walked around it. The next day, I sat down with my ex-husband to watch a documentary we had rented from the Florida International University library where we were both studying. I, in the liberal arts masters program, he, in the Spanish Literature PhD program. Anyhow, we sat down and started to watch an interview with Carl Jung. We were both very curious about Jung's ideas on the collective unconscious. As we watched, Jung begins to talk about archetypes, dreams and symbols and then the image I had seen in my dream appeared on the screen: the serpent/dragon eating its tail. I screamed out loud and shared the story with my husband. I had never seen this image before, except in my dream the night before. Jung went on to talk about this symbol: the Uroboros. I'll never forget that moment of "synchronicity," a term also defined by Jung.
Needless to say, the Uroboros, the dragon eating its tails, has carried a great deal of significance for me. Not only am I a dragon in Chinese astrology, but as Jung explains in Psychology and Alchemy, this symbol "is the basic mandala of alchemy," and refers to the circularity of all things, the regenerative power of life and death. The symbol appears in the Codex Marcianus which dates to the 10th or 11 century, together with the legend of the One, the All (see image). This circularity of time-space and life-energy is an important part of my own philosophy and is incorporated in my art. As a matter of fact, my AMO logo reflects the Uroboros within the open letter O, metaphorically reinforcing the circuitous, regenerative nature of all things. Oftentimes, I embed this symbol in my art pieces. Circularity is a constant force in my existence. I can go on about this for pages, but I'll simply state that my art practice is a literal act of continued form and transformation. Every piece is an expression of, what Jung refers to as, an "alien will," beyond my consciousness, connected with the collective unconscious. My creative impulse and urge is a need beyond words, yet continuous and constant. Circular. Which symbol carries meaning for you? AMO Ana Martinez Orizondo is a Cuban pastel artist, writer and culture creative living in Shelter Island, NY. Her work explores themes of ecology and spirituality as well as identity and culture through landscape, nature and portraiture. She is a fascinated by mystical liminal states of in-betweenness, portals to otherness, and amorphous forms. The textural play between soft and hard pastels on smooth or ragged, Indian paper adds to the push and pull of my creative process, and its alchemical power. Circularity, pastels, artist, Jung, alchemy, psychologyFor most of my life, I was told "you are too sensitive," "don't be so emotional," "this isn't about feelings," "don't bring your feelings into the conversation." Some of these phrases, were followed by laughter, or a smirk or another body language which added another layer to the statement. Little by little, I began to feel ashamed for feeling. I began to apologize for how I felt, before I even said what it was I was feeling. "I know I'm being overly sensitive, I know you don't want to hear this, I know how you hate seeing me cry... but, I'm feeling..... " Needless to say, this baseless shame is how I started to form an identity dependent on how others viewed and judged me. I restrained my feelings, dressed them up in fake strength and they festered in anger. Yet, when I was in a state of deep feeling, something inside me said, "this is your authentic self" and thus, the artist in me emerged during these crucial moments by taking pictures of myself. I used these self-portraits to reflect, analyze, and inquire into my being and the meaning behind the very essence of my humanity. I questioned everything when I looked into myself. My sadness, shame, anger. Until I started to take responsibility and act on this inquiry. Through the years I signed up for group therapy, individual therapy, life coaching, nature healing retreats, meditation, and sound and crystal healing. What I have discovered, is not only that feeling is my strength, but also my saving grace. Through feeling, I am human, I am, I exist, I create. During lockdown last year, I took a look back at some of those self-portraits and decided to transform pain into authentic strength by turning them into pastel works. They act as catalysts of self-transformation. By drawing these self-portraits, I realized how strong I was then and acknowledged my resilience. The act of re-creating the moment, reinforced my capacity to overcome, start over and make better choices. How, just as I participated in my own suffering, I can initiate self- love and happiness. The choice is mine. I hold the key. My vulnerability is my armor. I will defend it, be it, show it and encourage others to allow themselves to be vulnerable. It is where authenticity opens us up to our higher selves. Feeling is my expression and I love expression. AMO Ana Martinez Orizondo is a Cuban pastel artist, writer and culture creative living in Shelter Island, NY. Her work explores themes of ecology and spirituality as well as identity and culture through landscape, nature and portraiture. She is a fascinated by mystical liminal states of in-betweenness, portals to otherness, and amorphous forms. The textural play between soft and hard pastels on smooth or ragged, Indian paper adds to the push and pull of my creative process, and its alchemical power.
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After the immediacy of my close family members and friends, probably less than ten beautiful souls, there is my chosen family, a spirit world of kindred spirits. This long-list of dead people, has saved me in my most darkest hours. These dust particles, stars in the night, breeze by the ocean, droplets of rain, light through the cloud, distant chirp by the rocks, these spirits (for lack of a better word) are great conversationalists. They are as alive and fertile as a blooming garden. They live in their words, films, art and music. They live in the stories they left behind. They breathe through how they lived, and the Universe continues to spread their love. When I was growing up, I was a very introverted child and spent a lot of time alone, or with my older brother. My Mom worked a night shift and it was difficult to see her during the week. I was seven, we had recently come to the United States from my native Cuba. My parents divorced as soon as we got to the land of the free, and I was in that awful process of assimilation. New culture, new language, changed family nucleus. School friends were scarce in Queens, NY. In my aloneness, my imagination was my electricity. Not only was it alive in the daytime, night was fertile territory too. I was a lucid dreamer, and had (because I no longer can) the ability to link dreams together. So, if the night before I was about to jump off a cliff in my dream, on the following night I'd jump. It was exciting. I love my dream time and my favorite dreams were, and still are, flying dreams. In addition to writing, which I've referenced in past blogs, I love reading. In those early elementary school years, my dead people were real and fictional. There was Anne Frank of course, the Hobbit and his adventures, and Francie, the protagonist in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. They were my people. |

Although I was an honor student, I loved the streets. Urban culture, along with all the bad words you find there, peeked my curious nature. As a matter of fact, my graffitti name was Bad90. I have no clue why I chose that name, but I wrote it everywhere. To avoid losing me to the streets, my Mom moved us to West New York, N.J. where there was a Cuban diaspora and a quieter lifestyle. I went to Memorial High School where I made real friends, many of which are still part of my life, and many new dead friends. In those years, I was introduced to literary giants like Pirandello, Buchner, Camus, Shakespeare, Emerson, Thoreau, Hesse, and Dostoyevsky to name a few. The only time I've ever stolen anything, was a book from the school library, Steppenwolf, which I still have on my book shelf.
Outside of school, my brother introduced me to other luminaries: filmmakers. We would spend our summers going to the Angelica and other great movies theaters in the city and devour one restrospective after another. In the dark, I fell in love with Ingmar Bergman, Tarkovsky, Goddard, Hitchcock and Kurosawa, just to name a few. At home, Mom immersed me in Cuban nostalgia, which usually came in the form of music. That's how I met bolero legends like Elena Burke and Omara Portuondo and learned how to dance to the Afro sounds of guaguanco with Celeste Mendoza. Brazilian tunes and jazz also became part of my listening party. In literature, music, dance and film I found my chosen community of kindred spirits.
Outside of school, my brother introduced me to other luminaries: filmmakers. We would spend our summers going to the Angelica and other great movies theaters in the city and devour one restrospective after another. In the dark, I fell in love with Ingmar Bergman, Tarkovsky, Goddard, Hitchcock and Kurosawa, just to name a few. At home, Mom immersed me in Cuban nostalgia, which usually came in the form of music. That's how I met bolero legends like Elena Burke and Omara Portuondo and learned how to dance to the Afro sounds of guaguanco with Celeste Mendoza. Brazilian tunes and jazz also became part of my listening party. In literature, music, dance and film I found my chosen community of kindred spirits.
At Bard College and then the University of Pennsylvania, my mind went from the Greek plays to Don Quixote and Latin American literature. It was then that my interest in my native language, Spanish, surfaced. I fell in love with the rhythm and sound of my language, and the masters who knew how to make magic with it. That's when Carlos Fuentes, Garcia Marquez, Cabrera Infante, Neruda, Borges and Paz, joined my chosen family. Some were living spirits who lived in far away lands, but they may have well been dead in my mind, I couldn't be with them in physical form. I realized then that magical realism was the world that felt most like my dream life, it felt lucid, I understood it, I could travel in it, I could wonder and get lost. Inside the worlds of magical realism, I felt like I belonged.
At Florida International University, where I earned my Masters in Liberal Arts, my interests were interdisciplinary. Ecology, psychology and spirituality were pulling, calling, and sometimes screaming. There is where I went deep into mythology and symbolism. My mind jumped from Carl Jung to the Aztecs and Joseph Campbell, from Frida Kahlo to Native American literature and spirituality. There is where I was exposed to the deep ecology movement and furthered my readings of nature writers like Barry Lopez and the counterculture guru, Theodore Roszack.
I had visited a ton of museums, galleries and art collector homes, but it wasn't until recently, in 2017, when I moved back to NYC from Miami that my personal connection to art exploded. My exposure to art in NYC and in Santa Fe, New Mexico, catapulted a process which started ten years ago when I began to experiment with my photography and doodling. Although I've taken art history, studied many books on the subject, and worked at the Frost Art Museum FIU for two years, my own art practice works from an amateur mindset. I make a deliberate effort to stay as innocent to my own artistic process as possible. In this expansive visual landscape, many friends have joined my dead people society. These dead people hang out with me all the time, I find them pretty cool. Georgia O'Keefe, Frida Kahlo, Agnes Pelton, Ana Mendieta and Hilma af Klint are some of the regulars. Oh, what great friends they make! The conversations we have! Their art, minds and lives are such an inspiration.
All this suffice it to say, that when I am alone, I am never alone. I am surrounded by kindred spirits who support my highest self. With them, I've co-created a universe which nurtures my soul. It is in this nurturing that I become. I love them. They are my dead people.
Who is in your universe?
AMO
Who is in your universe?
AMO
Improvisation is the act of making or doing something not planned beforehand, using whatever is available. All the arts, and some non-artistic fields, have forms of improvisation. In writing, it would manifest as stream of consciousness, in music I would say jazz is the mothership. Our lives, in general, oftentimes are improvised. No matter how we want to control or pre-plan, sometimes the Universe has other plans, as in a pandemic, and we adapt, we improvise.
Improvisation is an essential part of my art process. As a matter of fact, I love listening to jazz, and all ramifications of jazz, when I draw. It puts me on the road to creative freedom. I've tried so many other genres of music to create, and I come back to jazz. Most days I live stream WBGO from morning to late afternoon, listening through the Blues Break. Whether it be the improvised sounds of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, or Miles Davis, the percussive beats of a Latin jazz jam, or scat singing by greats like Ella Fitzgerald, there is nothing like jazz to set me free. For me, drawing and writing, or any creative act is an act of self-expression, freedom of expression, surrendering and allowing the authentic self to be heard, seen, and acknowledged. Improvisation, or allowing the 'flow' of the self to reveal itself without censorship or editorial input, is where I spend much of my creative time and is the reason I choose jazz to accompany me in the journey.
My abstracts are born 100% from a place of improvisation and stream of consciousness. They start with one line, followed by one color, and the rest reveals itself as I let myself flow. I get out my way. Sometimes, the ego "I" wants to be included, and I sense it like a cloud over my head. I acknowledge it, and wish it well in its journey. To get into the flow, just like a musician, I rehearse, I practice, I experiment. I may do five minute studies on 6 x 6 paper tiles, (see example on left) or a series of daily portraits with oil pastels (see below, center). Whatever comes out is useful for my creative process. For example, the five minute 6 x 6 abstract I did in 2019 led to the large abstract work I finished this year, Hovering, a work also born out of stream of consciousness. In addition, I journal daily. Like writer Julia Cameron pointed out in her book The Artist's Way, much is revealed when you practice something consistently. What she termed, "morning pages," is a tremendous resource for any artist. Writing on paper, the act of writing, is a powerful stream, if one just lets it flow. The lesson I learn from all of this is to show up. Show up to your daily practice, whatever that is, without judgement, and simply start. Then watch, what writer Elizabeth Gilbert termed, the "Big Magic" happen. AMO |
"Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth - our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human."
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World .
Today kicks off week three of working on a new artwork for my Tree Stories series. It is the first time I am using four panels of Indian (shizen) paper to construct one image. The piece is inspired by the photo included in this post which I took during a 2018 winter vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World .
Today kicks off week three of working on a new artwork for my Tree Stories series. It is the first time I am using four panels of Indian (shizen) paper to construct one image. The piece is inspired by the photo included in this post which I took during a 2018 winter vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Trees and "wildness" are my ultimate teachers. I wonder what colors and lines I will discover this week as I listen and look deeper?
AMO
AMO
Have you ever written your name on sand? Chiseled your lover's initials on a tree trunk and brushed off the splinters with your hand? Pushed your fingers into the soil to plant a seed? Do you remember the graininess of the sand particles? the rough uneven edges on the bark? the chalkiness left between your fingers once you pulled your hand from the ground? I love those textures.

The idea of trying out Indian paper for my pastels came out of a love for textiles and fibers. I wanted to test various surfaces and see if the pastels would hold and stay true to their colors. So, I went to Blick, a huge art store in NYC, and bought a bunch of different color Indian paper. As a writer, I love paper in general, but Indian paper, also known as shizen paper, is made of recycled cotton rags, not trees, and so my love for it has grown that much greater.
After I returned from a trip to New Mexico where I fell in love with the land, light and expansive landscapes, I did my first piece on Indian paper in an effort to capture the textures of that beautiful, massive earth. This particular image, was one of the first ones I did, if not the first, you can literally see the fibers on the paper. Since my New Mexico series, I've experimented much more, and my love for the raggedness of the paper and its interaction with pastels has deepened further. I also did a three part piece which I threaded together with wool, all in the name of experimentation and texture. We will see where the threading leads me.
Working my fingers through Indian paper reminds me of bark, touch, rope. It braids me into connection with Source.
It grounds me.
AMO
After I returned from a trip to New Mexico where I fell in love with the land, light and expansive landscapes, I did my first piece on Indian paper in an effort to capture the textures of that beautiful, massive earth. This particular image, was one of the first ones I did, if not the first, you can literally see the fibers on the paper. Since my New Mexico series, I've experimented much more, and my love for the raggedness of the paper and its interaction with pastels has deepened further. I also did a three part piece which I threaded together with wool, all in the name of experimentation and texture. We will see where the threading leads me.
Working my fingers through Indian paper reminds me of bark, touch, rope. It braids me into connection with Source.
It grounds me.
AMO
"We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of he whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty. to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beautitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object are one." "The Oversoul" essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson
After reviewing ten pieces from the Tree Stories series, a patron who serves on the Creative Capital board wrote, "I've noticed that you are particularly interested in the structural aspects of a tree or branch that has been severed. Your tree series has a weight to it, a sense of mass and weight." Then he offered a definition of matter: "Noun, physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit; (physics) that which occupies space and possesses mass especially as distinct from energy." He continued, "you seem to be working within the confluence between the spiritual and the physical. It's very interesting to me that by definition matter is distinct from the mind and the spirit. And yet you have chosen to depict mass in order to convey spirituality. This to me is the interesting question to mark..." As all creators know, there is the art and what it means to the creator, and then there is the interpretation of others. I struggle with over contextualizing my work, because I believe that as long as one is pulled-in and emotionally moved by the work, it's all good. In addition, our own artistic expression changes continually, the way we see our own work changes daily. Just looking at one of my pieces from a different angle, alters how I feel about it. Sometimes, when I look at a piece I did a few years back, I find associations I had not made when I first drew the image and thus its meaning also changes. Hence, how we contextualize is framed by time. |
![]() For me, trees are not "things," they are not a "what," but rather, a who, a being. Yes, they are matter, but they are also, Spirit. There is no dualism. As beings, they communicate, through scent, roots, branches and as a collective. I recently read The Hidden Life of Trees and Braiding Wheatgrass, two wonderful books which further explain the science behind how trees, and plants in general, communicate. It just happens that I walk around tuning my eyes to their souls, consciousness, Spirit. This consciousness lives in a continuum, a sacred time-space, always in transformation. When I see trees, especially when they are broken-open, severed, or damaged, I get to see these souls in transition. I get a glimpse at what they once were, previous lives, the remains of their story. Much like an open Egyptian casket of a king or queen, where one would see a skeleton and the things they loved around them, in this case, it is not a casket, it is a spirit being in its natural setting, and around it, other earthly spirits. All is energy. In both of these examples, the Egyptian casket and the tree, a narrative appears which references how they lived, possibly who or what they loved. How do I capture these stories? First, I take pictures during mindful, meditative walks, of trees, stumps, trunks, that have an interesting form, texture, color or composition. At the moment I take the picture, I don't necessarily see all the intricacies of the image. It is only when I begin to draw it, that the story appears. The best word I can find to explain this creative process is, alchemy. It is in the seeing that I too am transformed. It is my hope that my art awakens the viewer to their connection to the natural world and inspires a sense of belonging and community. Click to see more of my Tree Stories. AMO |
Ana Martinez Orizondo
Artist and culture creative.
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