Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/luzluaart/
Website: https://www.davidjonfosterart.com/TheLuzLuaGallery.html
Biography
The awareness of my own mortality motivates me to find a deeper perspective in fully appreciating the gift of life.
My life began in Michoacan, Mexico where I was born. Later my family and I moved to the United States where I became an artist as well as an educator. I graduated from the University of the Pacific with a Master’s in Education and later completed a Master’s in Fine Arts degree at the Institute Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico.
Mexico and the United States provide me with an awareness of the Mexican and American culture. I feel engaged within two countries that I love and respect. Mexico is my birthplace, and it provides me with a rich culture, my primary language, and an extended family. The United States provides me with an environment that I appreciate as a diverse collective society.
I have been an educator for almost 32 years. I teach at San Joaquin Delta College as an adjunct art professor. I also teach full-time at Weber Institute through Stockton Unified. Working with high school and college students, provides me with an insight to understanding my students’ journey in the process of visual development. My goal as an educator is for my students to become independent creative thinkers that are not afraid to challenge themselves and seek to create art that provokes, inspires, and challenges a society.
In my work as an artist, I seek to find the truth about others, my surroundings and myself. Art is the place of intuitive understanding and deeper, perhaps even spiritual realizations. Art has the capacity to give people insight into the value and meaning of life.
Life and death are two opposites that intertwined in the cycle of life. As a child and later a young adult, I never fully understood how death could be a time of peace, prayer and acceptance. Now I am aware that life is a journey that has to be lived, to be explored, and to be discovered before your final day.
My creative challenge is to become an integral artist, engaging from matter, body, mind, and soul to spirit.
Artist Statement
Life and death are two opposites that merge in the cycle of life. As a child and later a young adult, I never fully understood how death could be a time of peace, prayer and acceptance. Life is a journey that has to be lived, explored and discovered before your final day.
It is surreal to see and experience how life can stop existing in the body of a person. Without the body to carry the spirit and soul of that individual, they do not exist in this immediate present. My father passed away this year in May. He was a devoted husband and father with very strong religious beliefs.
The ritual of praying is a constant reminder of our immortality. We ask for forgiveness and hope that at our time of departure from this earth, we will join our loved ones in heaven.
One portrait is of my father in his 20s during the late 1950’s. The prayer in the background is his devotion and faith in our holy father. The rosary was a constant sound in my home or during mass as a child and as an adult. The second portrait is a depiction of my twenty-year-old son, Keith. He represents the next generation in our family. The words in the background are the “Prayer for Life.” Both images represent the cycle of life.
In contrast to pieces that carry a lot of personal emotion, I’m also exhibiting another piece, “Doodle,” is an art practice that helps me to daydream and lose my thoughts; to take deep breaths to relax, unwind, and scribble my thoughts. It is a time when I can relax, not over think, and be spontaneous. I do not wait for inspiration, but I explore a direction. This work are just doodles that intertwine and represent my random thoughts at different moments to find clarity in my ideas
Keith, 2025
Acrylic
40” x 30”
NFS
Papa, 2025
Acrylic and color pencil on paper
40” x 30”
NFS
Doodle, 2025
Mixed media on canvas
24” x 24”
$300