I arrived carrying many of the habits I had learned elsewhere: to observe, sense, interpret, organize, understand. The forest asked for something different. It was too alive, too layered, too indifferent to the categories I brought with me. Everything seemed to exist in relationship: plants, insects, water, sound, decay, growth, darkness, rain - what local indigenous call Ayni.

Over time, and especially through ceremonial work and plant dieta, I began to experience the forest less as a landscape and more as a presence.

One of the plants that became particularly meaningful to me was bobinsana. During dieta, the relationship was not intellectual. It was learned through attention, silence, dreams, sensation, and repetition. Whether understood spiritually, psychologically, symbolically, or in some combination of all three, the experience changed the way I related to the natural world.

Nature stopped feeling like something outside of me that I could simply look at.

It became something I could enter into relationship with.

That shift eventually followed me into painting.

In the studio, I became less interested in deciding what an image should become. Instead, I began creating conditions in which something unexpected could emerge: repeated gestures, irregular tools, water allowed to behave unpredictably, pigments meeting one another without complete control.

The process began to resemble something I had learned in the forest.

Act, then listen.

Make a gesture.

Notice what changed.

Respond rather than impose.

Sometimes an image appears. Sometimes only movement remains. Occasionally a figure, animal, plant, face, or presence seems to surface from the marks without having been consciously planned.

I have learned not to resolve those moments too quickly.

The temptation is always to name what appears, clarify it, improve it, finish it, make it more real. But the forest taught me something about allowing complexity to remain complex.

A painting does not always need to explain itself.

Some of my work now begins with materials that carry those experiences directly into the process. In Essence, for example, I used a stem of bobinsana as a painting tool. The plant was no longer merely something remembered from the Amazon. Its physical irregularity became part of the mark itself.

The stem resisted precision.

That resistance mattered.

Each movement produced something slightly unpredictable, forcing me to respond to what actually happened rather than what I intended to happen.

This relationship between intention and surrender has become central to my work.

I still make decisions. I choose color, material, movement, and when to stop. But increasingly I am interested in the moment when authorship becomes less certain—when the painting seems to develop an internal logic of its own.

That is what I brought home from the Amazon more than any particular image.

Not a vocabulary of exotic symbols.

Not an attempt to reproduce visions.

A different quality of attention.

A willingness to enter the work without already knowing where it needs to go.

And perhaps most importantly, the possibility that creation is not always an act of imposing form.

Sometimes it is an act of listening long enough for form to reveal itself.