I'm a Mexican immigrant, recovering narcissist, self-taught professional artist, raised in Europe and currently living in Texas. If it that sounds complicated, well it kinda is. I'm married with two children that make me grateful to be a dad. My wife, Shelby is my inspiration. She is my true north for most things in life. I've never met someone with so much empathy for all living things. She has the true soul of an artist. We love taking trips to invigorate our artistic souls. Recently our travels have been focused on Missoula, MT and Merida, MX. Both are amazing cities that we enjoy visiting before moving up to Minnesota.

Currently, I enjoy working from home as I focus on developing my work. I've learned to become multidisciplinary in my art. I love painting with acrylic but I often depart to drawing with charcoal and graphite as well as practice with oils. But my departure ventures further into music production. I'm horrible, lol. But I do it so I can fulfill a childhood dream as well as pick up lessons here and there that transfer to my art. I'm also training for a marathon in June 2024. My first one! So far its been a challenge for sure! But it's taught me to be consistent and push through discomfort. 

My style has largely remained colorful and vibrant over the years. Largely focusing on developing my skills across portraiture, landscapes, still life, and even abstract. I think it's important to never have a process but to constantly experiment. Currently my focus is on Mayan indigenous art. As well as finding the crossroads between it and my journey through mental health. 

Meet Shelby Arias Castanon

I grew up in rural West Texas and spent the first 30 years of my life in the south. My upbringing originated in Southern Baptist and conservative mindsets and my work largely speaks to my deconstruction of the political and religious ideas that I grew up with.

One of the most challenging aspects of this journey has been learning to deal with feelings of disappointment. Disappointment, and the grief that accompanies it, has never been an acceptable topic in the south where I grew up and it causes me the greatest struggle as I have moved to my adulthood. 

The greatest antidote I have found to this struggle to overcome grief and disappointment is experiencing and caring for animals. My art largely revolves around the sheer joy that comes from their presence and the devastation they leave behind when they go. 

Learning to accept this reality and use art to move through my feelings of grief towards loss has become the core reason why I create and how I teach art to others. Art holds the power to concretize the happy memories we want to remember most and to move through the pain of memories we feel we cannot survive. I am greatly inspired by Tolkien's philosphy that art's greatest purpose is that it "makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange." In that, I think art is the greatest medium to help us and those around us grow.