Resilience/Trauma Artwork

My name is Salenia Sanchez. I'm 30 years old. I'm a contemporary painter. Currently finished up my last year in Graduate school at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn New York. I am now a working Art Therapist fulfilling my passion/calling in life. I was Born in Bronx, New York. I'm adopted and very blessed. I love shapes, color, and everyday found objects. I love to move vibrating paint as Art has given me the tools and courage to help me co-birth a new language every time I paint or draw. I was 16 when I was uprooted from Florida and transplanted to Tennessee. I found it difficult to ground myself in my new surroundings. I felt alienated from my peers because of our cultural differences. From this emotionally challenging experience, I gained a deeper appreciation for diversity. Due to COVID-19 I was forced back to Tennessee, to an environment that felt like unfinished business. Now, moving back home to Brooklyn NY, I learned a deeper relationship to the natural world using different shapes, textures, and colors. This challenge of adjustment and contemplation soon seeped into my work. My palette naturally evolved to express a more emotional, passionate truth and fear. Beginning with an empty space that argues love and lies, I developed these altered landscapes of introspective and celebratory experiences. The trunk, the branches and twigs of my paintings are reflections of a fictive realm that dwells inside me. The disorganizations of these shapes found in these paintings were a confession of both my doubts and my solutions.