Bio
Erika Alonso (b. 1987) is a Cuban-American painter, working and living in Houston, Texas. Her childhood was spent in Southern California, a place she often “escapes” to while painting. Alonso is a self-taught artist and an unabashedly painterly painter. Her current makings involve experimenting in abstract expressionism through a series of whimsical, abstract-figurative-landscape paintings that are meant to capture a moment in all its fleetingness—the movement and rush and whirl of it.
The artist describes her work as an escape from reality: “My paintings are just places I’d like to be, places where I’d like to spend my time. Places that are stimulating, enchanting, complex, and consistently inconsistent.”
Artist Statement
My work resides at the intersection of abstraction and figuration: painterly swirls of color, lyrical lines, a watchful eye in the sky, windows as escape hatches, reflection pools, cascading flowers (that are also people), birds, snakes, and animals of all kinds. My art explores how thoughts and memories—and the feelings they evoke—can translate visually through the intuitive use of color and strong gestural marks.
I work primarily in acrylic and watercolor, and while my method is not restrictive, it often begins with gestural mark-making. From there, I unmask figures (or non-figures) through a series of additional layers. The unmasking itself is a practice of presence and structured wonder. Influenced by my immediate surroundings, I work quickly, chasing a glimpse of something in the paint and ink. This aspect of my process comes across to the viewer as figures emerge and then recede, only to appear again, perhaps slightly different than before. The indeterminateness of my paintings offers the viewer a chance to interact with the picture on their own terms and come to their own conclusions about what they see.