Sanda interview, date? Scene one, take one, roll one.
Okay Sanda, if you can go ahead and tell us a little bit about your art.
Well basically my artwork has a lot of pain in it.
It influences pain a lot because I realized when I was younger I would always have a lot of things in my life that would get in my way or I'd have a lot of problems I'd go through a lot.
So my artwork has a lot of that influence in it and for example I have a lot of hand gestures in my drawings emphasizing strength or growing or power.
And in the eyes, when you draw in the eyes, when I usually paint the eyes have an intense feeling or the expression on the face is, when people look at it they can tell that there's something wrong with it, that there's pain inside of it.
That's mostly what I work with.
Hello people, how's that? Okay, Sanda, scene two, take one, roll one.
Okay Sanda, if you could tell us, tell us about how you first noticed the murals and how they changed.
Well I've always lived around 18th Street and 18th Street, that's where I see most of the murals.
So when I used to live in the north side, no murals, I would barely see anything.
When I started to move to 18th Street I started noticing murals and seeing what they were about.
Except I didn't know why they had so much pain inside of them.
I noticed that a lot of the murals it was like struggling, people struggling, people fighting, swords or poor people holding babies, things like that.
I always wondered why it was like that.
Now, that was before, that was like six, seven years ago.
Now I notice that the murals aren't like that as much.
Now the murals are more happier or more simple or businessmen with suits or you know, that's the kind of things that I see now.
I don't see as much struggle.
It seems like if things are getting better that's what the community seems like.
When I first started painting murals it was hard for me because I was always used to painting in the small area.
I was afraid of drawing on a mural.
I was always afraid to pick up my pencil or my paintbrush and draw big.
I always thought that it was going to come out wrong.
But when you do it you realize that you draw the person inside of your mural.
You make them look at it and want to walk inside and join you.
And that's part of why I like it so much, just the fact that I can work large.
I can show people more expressiveness, more things about myself or about the mural itself.
And you just draw people inside and that's basically what I like about it the most.
How did you feel the first time you painted a mural? The first time I was so scared.
I just, I was used to painting with oils that used to be part of me.
And I started painting with acrylics.
I thought it would be much harder with acrylics.
The fact that the mural was so large, it scared me.
It made me pull away from it and I didn't want to.
So I was timid with it and I didn't want to paint.
I was telling my teacher I didn't want to do it.
But once I started to do it I got this sudden confidence inside of me.
Just the fact that it was coming out beautiful.
So much attention, you know.
It was a big difference.
I was scared but now I like it a lot.
Okay.
So you want me to wait until you tell me to ask a question? Uh, snake.
Sandra, scene three, take one, roll one.
If you could tell us about the messages in your murals and why those messages you've chosen.
Well one thing with me was I grew up in a neighborhood where there were lots of gangs.
And that was a big influence on me.
My artwork when I was in eighth grade, seventh grade, had to do with boys smoking or guys in gangs with tattoos and everything else.
And I didn't realize that it was a negative influence.
I thought wow, this is great.
You know, my brother's in gangs.
All my friends are in gangs.
So I just draw about it.
Well it turns out that the more I realized that gangs were just a ruining thing, that they were beating up on people or beating up my brother or threatening my life, threatening my family's life, I started to put my artwork against gangs.
I started to change my artwork completely.
It was like a sudden change.
It just popped out of nowhere.
My artwork started to say, you know, get out of gangs or just, well this was really cartoon -like things.
And my friends started getting pregnant.
Half of my friends got pregnant.
So my artwork just was saying, you know, just let's cool down on this and realize what life's more about.
So I would do things against, what do you call it, against incest, against child abuse, against everything.
So I guess what was turning out was I was realizing more that not to hang around with that kind of a group and notice that your friends are like this, your peers are like this, and maybe you don't want them to be that way and just try to talk to people to get away from it.
That's what mostly Mariqua was about.
That's what I mostly influenced on.
And can you describe how the murals affect people, the messages? Yeah, because I didn't think that they affected people that much.
I thought they would just look at it, oh that's nice, that's interesting, you know, until I worked at José Clemente Orozco.
I worked on a large mural, I think it was five by eleven, and it was just a nice scene, sort of from Paris.
It was taken from Paris.
And the thing about the mural was I didn't think it would make that much of a difference on people because of how calm it was.
But when I went to the office a few weeks later, people were more calm, more happy, more cheerful.
At least that's what I had noticed.
And if I look at a mural in the street and if I see how it has something to do with against gangs or against homosexuals or whatever, anything that it has to do with, it does influence me just by looking at it.
It makes me think, and I'm sure it makes other people think.
I'm pretty sure it does.
Is there actually five of them? I don't know, I'll change it.
Sandra, scene four, take one, roll one.
Okay, any time.
And, okay, starting with your favorite things in murals.
The thing about murals that attracted me, or the certain murals that would attract me the most were the type that had a lot of activity in them, that had lots of people inside of it moving like crazies or holding up flags and just that they were pretty active.
Those are the kind that would attract me.
To me they had earth tone colors and the colors were kind of bright in a way, something about them.
And those are the type of murals that would always catch my attention and make me stare at them for a long time.
And when I would go to the north side a lot, I would see a lot of murals with the greens, earth tone colors.
So that would remind me a lot about Puerto Rico.
I want to learn more about Puerto Rico.
I want to paint more about it.
I want to paint more about my country, about my people.
And it was hard because I was raised in a background of Puerto Rico.
So what I'm trying to do a lot with my artwork now is, well, I'm trying to gather as much information as I could to know more about it and to, in my artwork, to express it.
And maybe one day I'll be exhibiting things about Puerto Rico on the north side or, because right now I'm exhibiting a lot around here in the Pilsen area.
And I'd like to go different places.
I'd like to exhibit in Puerto Rico.
But I wanted to do with my country.
That's all I could come up with.
I just suddenly forgot everything.
Sandra, scene five, take one, roll one.
So begin with the art versus the message and how you balance that in your own work.
Well, basically, I normally work with my technique the most.
That's what I, I think that's what I study the most.
When I work with technique, I feel that the person, it attracts their attention more than the subject itself.
So that's really important to me, the technique that I use.
Of course, the subject too.
But I just like it.
I just like the feel of the pencil or the paintbrush, just the strokes.
I love strokes a lot.
And that's what my artwork is mostly about.
If I use a person inside of it or if I use an object, I'll try to make it as, even if it's a dull object, I'll try to make it as powerful as I could by my technique or things like that.
What kind of feedback do you get? Criticism, compliments? Oh, I get a lot of that.
I get compliments, but then again I get the negative parts.
And it used to hurt me a lot.
I used to just lock myself up in my room or just think about it, jeez, I wish they wouldn't have told me that way, you know.
Maybe I did something wrong or maybe they don't like my technique or they'd say that it was too scary or it was too, my mom especially would get scared of my artwork because sometimes I draw evil things.
It was just the mood I was in.
It wasn't because I had this evil person inside of me.
But I'd like it and I'd like all my artwork and people would just come and say, well no, you should just, you should change that Sandra.
And I just, I didn't like people telling me that doesn't look right or things like that.
But from that I learned, now I can take that criticism constructively and I can just, I can, from what they say, I can paint something even better, you know.
It's up to what they say.
I let myself go with other people, what they think of my drawings, and that's what's going to hopefully help me in the future.
Before it used to hurt me a lot though and now, now I think I can handle it.
The pain and the evil that you say comes out in your artwork, where do you think that comes from? Is it influenced by the community or are you angry? Oh, yeah, I think that's what you would say.
I think it's a mixture of both the community and what I went through as a younger person or when I was younger.
What would happen was in my community it was so bad, I didn't like it.
It was, I'd walk around and there were just gangs fighting with each other.
I'd walk with my mom and gangs just fighting or with knives and just screaming out all these gang symbols.
So what I would do is just, I'd stay at home.
I wouldn't like to go out.
If I'd go out I'd just play some sports or something.
But it came to a point where I was threatened by a guy with a knife.
He threatened me because I was my brother's sister and he was in a gang.
And it just, it was getting out of hand.
My brother's best friend got shot and he just fell on the floor and was just bleeding, whatever.
He died.
And it was a lot of anger in me and I just wanted to get it all over with.
So at that point that's when I started creating all these, the paintings that started getting more evil.
