Embracing Death - Artist Profile - Analee Fuentes - Ethos Magazine Spring 2009

Embracing Death
by Alison Egan-Lodjic
Story by Alison Egan-Lodjic Photos by Chris Parker

Analee Fuentes’ Coburg, Oregon, home is covered in her own work. Drinking tea from a mug featuring Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, she directs attention to the skeletal figures on her windowsill and then to a wall size painting of her grandmother on a sofa surrounded by flying tacos. Although mostly of her own creation, Fuentes’ decor is a testament to her talent, not her pride. But the true introduction to this Mexican American artist lies across her garden and in her studio.Natural lighting is abundant in her cluttered yet creative workspace. “I’m kind of a pack rat,” Fuentes admits as she pulls out small animal skulls, bones, and a snakeskin—a tribute to her love of finding and collecting strange things. Death inspires her, as seen in her skeletal depiction of Bona Lisa, and her self-portrait with the bony figure of death embracing her. Fuentes calls death a “companion,” saying, “Me and death are good buddies. I have my skeleton as a physical reminder when I’m in here. I light my incense and talk to my ancestors, it’s a little ceremony, it’s good for me, even when my work changes or I’m doing something else. It’s very ritualistic.”

Her ancestry, family, and heritage all contribute to her work. Fuentes’ use of bright vivid colors and imagery creates canvases indicative of her Latina culture. Fuentes’ main source of inspiration is her family; her sister, mother, and grandfather are all artistically inclined. Artists such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Velásquez, Alfred Quiroz, and other contemporary artists also contribute to her visions.Fuentes’ mother had a genuine appreciation of the arts—and not just in terms of visual art. “For a poor Mexican woman she was amazing,” Fuentes says. “She would listen to opera, she would take us to the museums and to the park. She was always appreciating art, she was always making something. Her favorite medium was clay, she made jewelry, she cut paper stuff; she was always doing art.” Fuentes says her natural artistic ability is the “family curse.” It has become a part of her way of life and the way she thinks about and relates to the world. “I think drawing and painting are like language,” Fuentes says, “It’s a way to speak without having to deal with the medium of words.”

On her website, Fuentes says, “My upbringing informs every stroke of what I paint.” She explains that her mother “always used to tell [Fuentes] that making art was like eating, that everybody needed to make art.” And although blessed with natural talent, making of art for Fuentes wasn’t always that simple. For a period of time, art wasn’t essential to her way of life.At one point in her life, Fuentes decided to become a nurse. “I was a vocational nurse,” she says. “Everybody says you can always find work as a nurse and I suppose that’s true, but I think you also think you have to find some real gratification in your work for it to be long-lasting.” And for Fuentes, nothing was as gratifying as her artwork. So, after about a decade as a nurse, she returned to her true calling: her art.Her family first planted the seed that art is good and art is necessary. And in her formative years, through schooling and early experience with nursing, her love of working with the figure along with the tradition of The Day of the Dead, led to her study of and devotion to art.

Everything ended up pulling her back towards creating art.“I fought off doing art for as long as I could and then one day I just decided I was going to go back to school. I thought I’d try graphic design because that was the logical choice in terms of blending a job and art. I found out after the first year that I was just not made for art on the computer or precise stuff. I wanted to be more expressive. I knew that it wasn’t going to be something such as “commercial art.” I knew it was going to be more expressive. By that time I had a baby, I was also trying to figure out how I would fit into a work life with an art degree, and I liked the idea of teaching. I thought maybe if I’m lucky, and I’m really lucky … I’ll be good enough and have good enough skills and communication I might be able to find a teaching job. That really was the target.”In 1987, Fuentes began teaching at Lane Community College in Cottage Grove. She instructed a non-credit class for children and their parents. Fuentes called the class an “extension of my early upbringing,” saying, “[I] thought it would be cool if father, mother, and child came in and could create something together. It was a start, and I started working everywhere I could to get experience in teaching.”

For Fuentes, nothing was as gratifying as her artwork. So, after about a decade as a nurse, she returned to her true calling: her art.And although at the time her daughter was young, Fuentes was still able to focus on creating her own art. “I’ve had strands of work that have been more commercial and I know what commercial art looks like,” she says, claiming it’s more decorative. “If I had to survive as an artist, if for some reason I wasn’t able to teach, I would probably move towards the things that I also love.”Fuentes says, “I love gold and stuff that’s sparkly, I love organic line and overdone; I mean if I’m not careful things get real[ly] overdone in here and I have to back up a little bit.” She refers to this style as “Mexican Baroque;” her definition of excess. “I think there’s some of that in some of these pieces, Baroque is usually associated with ornate and beautiful, apparent in much of the different Chicano art, along with the tendency to embellish.”Fuentes’ embellishments are seen in her work with the figure, the body, and her representations of death.

From an early age, she was exposed to the tradition of The Day of the Dead, and the fact that in her culture, death isn’t a finality. “You go to a person’s gravesite and talk about them,” she says, “which isn’t implying that it isn’t a sad event, but it’s not a finality. I still talk to my mother and my grandmother; they are still a part of my life.”She goes on to say, “I think that death is going to come to all of us, in other words, we better have a really good time while we’re here, make the best of it in fact.” She says that The Day of the Dead “makes fun” of death, illustrating that it’s inevitable; a reminder to make the most of life. “In that way,” Fuentes says, “It’s not morbid or even depressing, it’s kind of like, ‘you know, hurry, you better have fun, you better make the most of it because that’s the end for all of us.’ Life and death are more of a mesh, more of a circle, a cyclical event.”

Raised with this kind of mentality that death can be silly and non-threatening, Fuentes says, “I think it models the way you experience and the way you live your lives,” which she brings out in all of her paintings. Some of her paintings have a specific intent while some are abstract, ranging from commissioned and commercial, to expressive.

However, a few of her paintings are just for her. One of her favorite mediums to work with, charcoal, helped her make two beautiful portraits of her mother and daughter. “I think those are the only ones that I probably wouldn’t put a price tag on, these just have a different feel to them; it’s family stuff.”And it’s all that “family stuff” that keeps her rich in tradition, ritual, and culture. But it’s only in recent years that her culture has grown close to her. Fuentes says that when she first arrived to the states in 1983, it was rare to hear people speaking Spanish. These days, according to recent statistics, one in every six children in Oregon public schools is Latino. “It’s a big brown wave. It’s great. I think diversity is important; it’s really the cornerstone of democracy. We learn about one another as human beings and how wonderfully different we can be. The browning of Oregon will be something that people have to deal with in one way or another.” It’s through her creativity and onto a canvas that Analee Fuentes embraces the growing diversity of Oregon, and shares her culture with fellow Mexican Americans, her students, colleagues, and patrons of her art.

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