![\"Artist](\"https:\/\/www.jacksonsart.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Jacksons_Itzel_02.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nContents<\/h2>\n
0:00<\/strong> “The search for joy is so important in my work”<\/p>\n 0:30<\/strong> “Some of the paintings are bright, but feel like they’ve been through a journey”<\/p>\n 1:20<\/strong> Introduction<\/p>\n 1:40<\/strong> “I feel like my art practice started from seeing my home like an installation in the Caribbean, and then also watching my mum do her own creative practice”<\/p>\n 2:10<\/strong> “I want the child energy in my work to make a case for happiness”<\/p>\n 2:50<\/strong> “I decided that I wanted to go to the University of Southern California and be an artist”<\/p>\n 3:48<\/strong> “Art became a form of expressing emotions”<\/p>\n 4:23<\/strong> “Explore myself more conceptually, find myself through the art I was making”<\/p>\n 5:37<\/strong> “Colour for me demands to be seen”<\/p>\n 6:37<\/strong> “You paint like a sculptor” <\/p>\n 7:32<\/strong> “Letting the spirit lead the practice”<\/p>\n 9:49<\/strong> “Drawing for me is so important”<\/p>\n 10:59<\/strong> “Depending on how I make those marks, that\u2019s how the composition forms”<\/p>\n 12:04<\/strong> “I love oil bars \u2013 they’re so buttery to me” <\/p>\n 13:49<\/strong> “Experimentation is really important, and I wish artists did that more”<\/p>\n 15:07<\/strong> “I just fell in love with abstraction, this was a pivotal moment in my art practice”<\/p>\n 15:47<\/strong> “My work is the mark of movement”<\/p>\n 17:28<\/strong> “There are times when I have to move my works away from each other”<\/p>\n 19:27<\/strong> “The symbols in my paintings are connected to the Orisha Ogun”<\/p>\n 21:28<\/strong> “The denial of colourblindness that might happen sometimes with abstraction”<\/p>\n 22:28<\/strong> “There’s a specific place in abstraction for me, where it begins to feel too busy” <\/p>\n 24:14<\/strong> “I used to think that natural light wasn’t important for me, but then I went to the Slade”<\/p>\n 25:30<\/strong> “The magic number for me is five or six hours in the studio”<\/p>\n 26:30<\/strong> “I feel like my paintings are like salsa”<\/p>\n 27:18<\/strong> “I want my paintings to look like food that we cook, like layers of sound in the music that we make, and I wanted to come from the lens and the gaze of an Afro-Latin, feminine perspective”<\/p>\n One of the things that inspires me the most, which is literally the foundation of the energy that my paintings give, is this search for joy. As someone who’s from the African diaspora, and someone who has experienced things like loss, the search for joy is so important in my work.<\/p>\n Sometimes that shows up in the most obvious way, like the colours that I use, because they’re really bright hues and I use yellow a lot. Colours that are easily recognisable and make people feel warm. But then the marks show an underbelly of it.<\/p>\n Some of the paintings are bright, but feel like they’ve been through a journey before you get to them. These heavier things are in contention with this childlike aesthetic, so the work is really about emotions and finding joy. The idea of connection between the child and the adult, then the ultimate act of movement in doing that. Those things are what really drive the paintings, then colour is the main tool I use to do that.<\/p>\n I want my paintings to be taken in, received, felt, and alchemised in the brains of whoever’s looking at them, but the gaze is always from an Afro-diasporic feminine eye.<\/p>\n When I was younger, I grew up in the Dominican Republic, and my house was full of so many adornments. My mum was an architect at the time, so she would always have her floor plans out in the 90s. She wasn’t using AutoCAD or anything. So I would be next to her with crayons, drawing and colouring. I feel like my art practice started from seeing my home feel like an installation in the Caribbean, and then also watching my mum do her own creative practice, which was her profession.<\/p>\n The people that react to my work the best are always children. They always feel happy. They see things in the paintings. They copy the paintings. Every time I’m painting and kids are around and they have paper, they always paint the painting.<\/p>\n I want the child\u2019s energy in my work to make a case for happiness. It’s something that’s so subtle, so visceral, so emotional, and it doesn’t have to be really meta, or highly conceptual. I just want to feel good, I want to feel happy.<\/p>\n Art making for me began in that space. It was the beginning of me learning that this is a thing that people do professionally and at home for themselves. After growing up in the Dominican Republic, my family moved back to the United States. Now we live in the South Bronx. I would go to this community centre that was in the bottom of my building. This local community artist came by and we made a giant project of a map of the Bronx using found materials. I remember for Yankee Stadium, we used an old baseball that we cut in half.<\/p>\n I was gravitating more towards sculptural practice to make visual work. A school teacher who went to boarding school in America suggested that I apply to boarding school, a prep school in Connecticut. That led me to studying art for the first time academically in a focused way at The Hotchkiss School. And after being in that rigorous college prep environment, I told myself, “Okay, now I want to do this in university.” And that led me to getting accepted to a few art schools in America. I finally decided that I wanted to go to the University of Southern California and be an artist and study at the USC Roski School of Fine Arts.<\/p>\n In the period between living in the Dominican Republic and returning to America, my mum passed. I noticed that after she passed, art, which was play for me in the Dominican Republic, now became a form of expressing emotions. And through that emotional expression, I created a portfolio that led me to an academic environment with art.<\/p>\n I wanted to live in a non-cold place. LA has palm trees, and it’s sunny, and paint dries faster (even though I wasn’t doing painting there). But I guess being part of the diaspora for me, it means being diasporic. So movement is important. I like the idea of going from the Caribbean to the East Coast, and now the West Coast, and landing at USC.<\/p>\n When I was at Roski, everybody who studies fine art has to start with painting and drawing, sculpture, and graphic design. I just loved the sculpture class more than any of the other foundational classes because it allowed me to be more experimental. I loved the freedom in BA, which allowed me to make the work that I wanted to make. I was making installations, I was doing performance, I was growing in graphic design. I put painting to the side because that Hotchkiss technique was so important, and I wanted to explore myself more conceptually in school. A lot of my work at the time was based on identity, black history, and femininity.<\/p>\n I was thinking a lot about the diaspora and food that connects us, especially living so far away from New York. There’s a Latin community in LA, but it’s not Caribbean. So I kind of had to find myself through the art I was making, which was really interesting. I feel like now the new stage that I’m entering in my practice is more of conceptual history and identity, as opposed to art for play, or art as a form of expressing emotion that I can’t really talk about.<\/p>\n In my last semester at USC, I actually studied abroad in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, and it was the best decision I’ve made in my undergraduate career. I remember telling myself, \u201cDon’t make any art in the time that you’re here, just take in the artistry that’s everywhere\u201d, because Bahia is such a magical place. All of the homes in Bahia are really colourful and bright, whether it’s energetically or visually. It’s also a place with the religions Candombl\u00e9 and Umbanda, which are Afro-Brazilian religions that are a blend of a bunch of tribes in Africa, particularly Yoruba, Congo, and Angola. This is a place that has extremely powerful, high, and intense African spiritual energy. <\/p>\n So there would be days in Bahia where I was on the bus going to school and people would just start reciting spoken word poetry. I was writing every day. I remember writing poems from dreams I was having. Those would be the beginning of some works that I would make in London right after that. It was a place that I felt like I needed for inspiration and I also danced a lot while I was there. I was using my body in a more trained, focused way. That led me to thinking \u201cWow, I like the feeling of just being here\u201d. My intuition lead, because it’s a place that asks for your intuition to lead, because every day feels like an adventure. <\/p>\n After those six months in Bahia, I graduated from USC. I’m not in school anymore, and I have this desire to draw every day. Drawing these figures, hands, nails, and clouds, and things that were so feminine, and rooted in being from the African diaspora. That then led me to having a painting practice which is just letting the spirit lead the practice, and letting the work be made intuitively. It made me say, \u201cWow, the ideas you have can only be expressed through painting\u201d. <\/p>\n I love colour. I feel like my colour theory comes from the Caribbean and is one of the tools I employ to bring joy to the forefront. I love using bright, saturated colour, and highly saturated hues because of the notion of black and brown bodies being made invisible in the psychological underbelly of a lot of the environments that they exist in. So colour for me demands to be seen. I want the colour to take a physical form.<\/p>\n Another reason why I love to make impasto paintings is because the oil paint just sits on the surface, like you almost want to grab it. I absolutely love Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Red, Cobalt Blue, Cerulean, Viridian Green, Burnt Sienna, and Burnt Umber. Those are always present. And the white that I use is always Titanium White. Burnt Sienna gets mixed into things a lot just to have the temperature be the same in the palette. <\/p>\n I usually have one grounding colour that does that and I find that it’s purples or reds. I make black, which I learned at the Slade, I mix Burnt Umber with Ultramarine Blue. But white is used often. I’m always mixing with it to make things just lighter and give tonal range into the work.<\/p>\n Because when I think about colour theory or Western understanding of it or just even marketing or graphic design, when you think of love, people think of red, pinks. But because I’m coming from an If\u00e1 perspective, when I think of love, I think of the deity associated with love, which is Oshun. So I’m thinking of amber and yellows.<\/p>\n Drawing for me is important. I don’t often draw to prepare for a painting, but I am a painter-drawer. The paintings are more in relationship to drawing than to painting, I feel. Oil sticks really help me do that. I sketch a lot and a lot of the sketches don’t become paintings, they just work on their own. I\u2019m working on a series of screen prints, so those require sketches because I wanted a range of what I can print. That\u2019s interesting, because I usually don’t work like that. I always use pencil. I love graphite, which is funny because, as much as I am a very pro-colour person, when I’m drawing, it’s just a simple greyscale because the drawings feel really colourful. That’s something that’s important to me, even if I’m using only one material. Drawing has helped me kind of work tonally in my paintings. I love it when artists do that. I think some of the most beautiful work a lot of us make is just a simple drawing because you don’t plan on drawing, you just draw.<\/p>\n Depending on the surface, I have different grounds. If it’s canvas, I usually just apply gesso. Sometimes I paint on hessian. I always use the Michael Harding Non-Absorbent Ground<\/a>. The process is always the same after the grounds are set for me, where I put a layer of acrylic first. It’s hard for me to just paint on white. I like to paint with baby blue first sometimes, or yellow. <\/p>\n Sometimes there’ll just be random marks all over the painting, and then depending on how I make those marks, that’s how the composition forms and I start building up from there. There are paintings that I’ve made where my hand just wasn’t steady as I was gessoing. So putting the first layer of acrylic down, there are shadows of movement across the canvas, and then I’m like, \u201cThat’s the composition. That’s how we do it\u201d. <\/p>\n After the acrylic is laid down, then it’s just layers, and layers, and layers of oil, or acrylic. Sometimes I have to compartmentalise it and remember where I put what, especially if I’m doing an abstract painting. I want the painting to feel like a body that’s getting added limbs to it.<\/p>\n I love oil bars. The reason I use them often in my work is because they remind me of being young and using crayons, so it just feels like the adult version. I always use R&F Oil Sticks<\/a> and that\u2019s my go-to. I just love the flow of it. They’re so buttery to me. The hues are perfect for what I’m trying to do and they’re so saturated. Sometimes when I get to the nub of them, I just mix a couple and add beeswax and other oils (like linseed or stand oil) to create a bigger stick. Then I get unique colours and because I use them so much there’s hints of the other paint because I work wet-on-wet a lot. Sometimes, I’ll add paint to make it thicker or make it brighter or add more pigment. I paint straight out of the tube and I make marks with the tube, or with the oil bars that are wrapped in paper. So sometimes a paper rips and I scoop paint with the paper, and I’ll make the marks with paper, or a palette knife.<\/p>\n Sometimes with my gloves, I just scoop paint and start smearing it. So not really a brush person, but if I need it, I’ll use it. I have so many brushes, which is funny, I feel like a lot of my painting is in my wrist and then just grabbing something and making a mark that way. <\/p>\n I find that when someone is a multi-disciplinary artist, people often think, \u201cOK, this person does lens-based, they do movement, they do sculptural work, they do installation\u201d. But the minute you add painting into that toolbox, you’re a painter. And I’m just like, \u201cI am a multimedia artist who paints\u201d. I just want every painting that I put in an installation, or even if I paint a wall as part of the installation, to be intentional and to be made well and to be in conversation with the other objects or elements that are in the room.<\/p>\n Painting and drawing are the first type of artwork that we all are met with as children. So I want to go back to this childhood energy of mark-making, just simply doing it. <\/p>\n Experimentation is really important and I wish artists did that more. I think going beyond the medium of choice is something that’s really important. Whether it’s to study it, make something in that other way, so then you could bring that back to the thing that you really want to specialise in. My identity is very intersectional, so it’s really hard for me not to look at creativity in an intersectional way. I would just say to artists, definitely experiment. And I know this sounds really cliche, but the more you bring other elements into your practice, the stronger it’s going to be because it can stand on its own and can be in conversation with other things. You’ve had all these stages of making art. You’ve done it for pleasure and play. You’ve done it for emotional release. You’ve done it for identity exploration and now it’s time to put all of that together, but master a craft. <\/p>\n The movement of my body started giving me marks that I couldn’t come up with on my own if I wasn’t moving my body in a certain way, and I just fell in love with abstraction. This was such a pivotal moment in my art practice because now abstraction gets introduced through movement after coming from a performance practice. Everything kind of exploded in beautiful ways. So since then, I started making these huge large scale paintings and these huge installations have to do with mark-making and moving the body, so I actually feel like my work is the mark of movement.<\/p>\n In a lot of my paintings, there’s this flow that happens. I noticed that when I’m done with a painting and I look at it, whether it’s figurative or abstract, there’s always a movement of colour that goes in a certain direction. So now when I look at my practice, I think \u201cOh, of course, I’m not only a painter, I’m a movement artist, I’m a multimedia artist, I’m a community organiser.\u201d And all of these are connected to performance and the moving of the body. That is the one thing I can say that ties all of the work that I do together. Just moving of the body, and feeling like something moved to create the work, is just really important to me.<\/p>\n As a black woman, you find that you are made invisible psychologically and physically in a lot of spaces in the world, especially Eurocentric places, which a lot of places are. So I think I was so drawn to space making as a physical thing and also as an environmental, emotional, spiritual thing. I kinda look at my practice as a form of taking up space so that what wants to be seen is seen and it’s undeniably being seen.<\/p>\n The bigger I work, I find that I go beyond the edge, which I’m enjoying. Especially because the body wants to move. And because I want the paintings to feel like they’re in movement, I want them to feel like they can walk out of the frame. Or elements of it can move away from it, instead of just vibrating in it. My paintings are very impasto, so there\u2019s a three-dimensionality. I remember someone at school told me you paint like a sculptor. And I was like, \u201cThis is the best compliment you could give me, because I want the work to feel like an object.\u201d<\/p>\n I want my practice and the works that I put out, particularly the paintings, to feel like if you look too quick, something just moved. I had sculptures in my degree show at Slade that were like all over the ground. It asked the viewer to move around them, to be in the space. This work demands you to see it and to move with it. It’s something that I just do a lot in my life naturally. I don’t see that ever not being the foundation for the practice. <\/p>\n A lot of the work is intuitive, I don’t even use references. I just really have to do something physically to even get to the studio to make anything. If I have a lot of visual references or objects in the room while I’m painting, it’s gonna feel like I’m walking behind someone on the street and I’m trying to copy their footsteps. <\/p>\n There are times where I have to move my work away from each other and just have the white wall to paint what I’m painting. And then there are other times where I just need everything in the room because I’m like, “Okay, I need bodies here. I need a body of paintings circling around me for me to make this one.” Because then I feel like the crowd is in the room and I’m making work with the crowd.<\/p>\n I remember one time being in the studio and having a friend tell me, “Wow, you make work without the guilt of what painting is supposed to be like, because of the tradition of painting for the last 2,000 years or more.” And then I was like, “Oh, yeah, I just don’t think about it.”<\/p>\n Nothing that I make is new because my mere existence comes from many people who came before me. So making work without research doesn’t take away the fact that things came before me or that research can come out of it. My favorite part of the practice is writing about the work after I made it, because that’s when I start connecting the dots and I think, oh wow, I pulled from this realm to do that. I don’t think you need to know who you’re connected to, to know you are connected to something. The body and the spirit really leads for me, and I know it comes from a realm that has all of ours connected to each other.<\/p>\n My spirituality is so important to the way I exist in the world and how I make work. So I’ve been practicing Isha Sheh If\u00e1 for the last 10 years. It’s a practice that is really rooted in character building. In some of my paintings, the symbols that I make, like swords, for example, especially in older work, are connected to the Orisha Ogun, which is a deity connected to the blacksmith works with iron.<\/p>\n Even the idea of the snail as a mark-maker comes from one of the Orisha that guides my destiny called Obatala, which is the Orisha connected to the child being moulded out of clay in the mother’s womb, which is why I work with clay. This idea of patience or Obatala manifesting as a snail and me thinking about how that energy supports my practice. Borrowing from those cultures is important for me spiritually because it helps me navigate the world from that ancestral background. The poetics of that culture are so expansive that I just feel like one lifetime is not enough for me to pull material from that.<\/p>\n I offer the viewer something limitless. It doesn’t have to be shocking. It doesn’t have to be grand. I don’t expect people to cry. I let them feel whatever they’re going to feel when they look at the work, I just want the viewer to leave my work and feel better.<\/p>\n With abstract painting, if it begins to feel too busy (which I don’t mind) sometimes it gets muddy and that’s when I realise I need to go. I’m losing the hues now. Sometimes the painting doesn’t really need more colour for me. It just needs tonal changes. So I\u2019ll use my phone to take a picture and make it greyscale to see which areas need more light. Then I need to tweak it slightly to get what I want out of it. And then I ask, is this balanced? Is this what I wanted to say? Is this feeling the way I want it to feel? This is when the work goes from a place of intuitive energy to a fine artwork. <\/p>\n I\u2019ll also take a picture of the work and use the markup feature on my phone to see how a colour would look in a corner or wherever. Then I do live editing of what I want it to look like, and if I need to fix it, or add to it, or remove anything. <\/p>\n I rotate the canvas a lot. I squint a lot. I back up a lot. It’s just a feeling, like if my body doesn’t want to move anymore in this way, my mind has left that plane, and the work is complete. <\/p>\n Currently, I’m at the ACME Early Careers Residency Space in Stratford. My space is set up directly across from the window, so I get this direct cast of light that comes in all the time. I need natural light. There are times where I’m in the studio and I just have to leave because it’s too dark. <\/p>\n I have all these tubes, rolled paint, a moving trolley, canvas, materials for sculpture, and books. I think because my work is very intuitive, I have to have the motivation to make art, because I’m not referencing anything, so if my spirit isn’t trying to do it, I’m not going to. Usually, I meal-prep (mostly Dominican food) and then I go to the studio and work for five or six hours in one sitting. I can’t do more than that.<\/p>\n Then there are other working days for me that are writing and researching. Those days are different because if I’m making an installation, I’ll probably be at home writing about it and doing 3D models of the space that I’m going to show the work in. I don’t paint when I stretch canvas, it\u2019s just so tiring and I stretch huge canvases a lot of the time. As long as I can just prepare the canvases to be ready for me, I do that for a few hours and I come back the next day. <\/p>\n I go through phases of what I’m listening to when I’m making work. Lately, I have been listening to memoirs of Michelle Obama and Jennifer Lewis, Pleasure Activism<\/em> by Adrienne Marie Brown, and an essay by Joan Morgan on the politics of pleasure from a black feminist perspective. I’ve been really listening to Kendrick Lamar, and Bad Bunny’s new album, DeB\u00cd TiRAR M\u00e1S FOToS<\/em>, is getting me into salsa. I feel like my paintings are like salsa.<\/p>\n Honey and Smoke<\/a><\/em> is an organisation and artist platform that was founded by Riva Santo and I’m a co-director with her. Honey and Smoke<\/em> is a place for artists from all over the world to create work that reacts to the themes of our time. It\u2019s such a sacred space. It is the front-facing aspect of my practice along with another person and it’s just been really a fun ride.<\/p>\n I love it when people see my work and they can tell I\u2019m a Caribbean, Latina, Black artist. These things are important to me. The energy of the work is the same no matter where I live, because my energy, and where I’m from is the same, no matter where I am. The environment changes, but my spirit doesn’t. I like that I was birthed in the Dominican Republic. The makings of me as a soul are really rooted in that place and my family. I want my paintings to look like food that we cook. I want them to feel like the layers of sound in the music that we make. I wanted to come from the lens and the gaze of an Afro, Latin, feminine perspective.<\/p>\n Follow Eilen Itzel on Instagram<\/a><\/p>\n Visit Eilen Itzel’s website<\/a><\/p>\n Developing a Daily Drawing Practice with the Royal Drawing School<\/a><\/p>\n Review of Michael Harding Brick Lane Oil Colours<\/a><\/p>\n Scumbling Techniques for Painting<\/a><\/p>\n Artist Insights: Joey Yu<\/a><\/p>\nExtract<\/h2>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
Oil on canvas, 170 x 130 cm | 66.9 x 51.2 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
Oil on wood panel, 32 x 21.5 cm | 12.5 x 8.4 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
Graphite and tape on paper, 22 x 20 cm | 8.6 x 7.8 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
Oil on wood panel, 60 x 55 cm | 23.6 x 21.6 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
Oil and pastel, 120 x 170 cm | 47.2 x 66.9 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
63.25 x 86.25 cm | 24.9 x 33.9 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
Graphite and tape on paper, 22 x 20 cm | 8.6 x 7.8 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
Graphite and tape on paper, 22 x 20 cm | 8.6 x 7.8 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
Oil on canvas, 130 x 120 cm | 51.1 x 47.2 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Photo credit:<\/strong> Chris Waltzer<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Photo credit:<\/strong> Chris Waltzer<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Photo credit:<\/strong> Chris Waltzer<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
Acrylic and oil on hessian, 147 x 149 cm | 57.8 x 58.6 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Photo credit:<\/strong> Joe Ereira<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Graphite and tape on paper, 22 x 20 cm | 8.6 x 7.8 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
Oil on canvas, 165 x 230 cm | 64.9 x 90.5 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
Oil on wood panel, 60 x 55 cm | 23.6 x 21.6 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
Graphite and tape on paper, 22 x 20 cm | 8.6 x 7.8 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
Graphite and tape on paper, 22 x 20 cm | 8.6 x 7.8 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
Acrylic and oil on hessian, 230 x 230 cm | 78.7 x 90.5 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena
Acrylic and oil on paper, 60.9 x 48.2 cm | 24 x 19 in<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Eilen Itzel Mena & Jemila Isa
Photo credit:<\/strong> Arthur Beardmore-Gray<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\nFurther Reading<\/h2>\n