The In-Betweens is a series of figurative oil paintings that explore what it means to be fully present in one’s body, mind, and identity while living in the charged middle spaces between burnout and recovery, visibility and vulnerability, protection and openness.

Using vivid color palettes and layered imagery, each portrait reveals something about the subject’s internal landscape while asserting their right to take up space exactly as they are. The people I paint are often rendered with overlays that reflect the truth that our environments, our histories, and our chosen communities shape us.

The title of the series refers not only to emotional or psychological liminality, but also to cultural and political in-betweens: what it means to be a woman of color in America, to be exhausted and joyful at once, to be seen and misrecognized, to belong and to resist. On a personal level, as a Latiné artist born in Colombia and adopted into a white American family, I have always lived in the in-between. I have been yelled at to “go back to my country” in the only country I’ve called home, yet I have also apologized for not being able to speak Spanish. This work is a refusal to flatten or simplify identity, and an invitation to consider the glow of a person’s spirit as inseparable from the world they move through.