From the Waist Down

A Creative Journey

On growing up drawing, letting go, and finding the thread that ties everything together.

That was 4-year old Sabrina. That litle, creative and very playful girl.

The Beginning

I have been drawing for as long as I can remember, which is to say, for longer than I have any clear memory at all. My mother used to say that before I could speak, I was already drawing. Not scribbling but really drawing. Expressing that way came before words.

It was never thought or approached it as a hobby and neither was I encouraged to think about it that way. It was just what I did with everything that surrounded me, saw, caught my attention or experienced. It was like the world entered through my eyes and came back out through my hands. It was fun.

I was maybe four years old and my family and I were traveling to Pereira, a city near Cali and I remember being at a hotel room with a block of paper and a pencil. I drew a woman, but only from the waist down. She had shorts and boots. There was a spider, about to bite her. I drew it. I told the story and my parents wrote the words underneath the image, the way they often did.

What struck them, and I still remember that, was not that a small child had drawn a person. It was that at that age I had made a conceptual choice: to frame a figure from the waist down, to imply the rest and to let the narrative live in what was cropped and what was shown. It was amuzing!

Again, 4-year old Sabrina on a Christmas morning!!!

Growing Up

I am grateful that my parents never enrolled me in formal art school as a child. Their reasoning was something I am very thankful for. An art teacher would have shown me how draw a tree looks like it is “supposed to look”. My parents wanted me to paint a tree however I saw it or imagined it.

That distinction, between learned representation and personal vision, shaped everything that came after.

I painted through my childhood and all through my teenage years. By the time I graduated high school, I had a real body of work and so much excitement about where to take it next. I was drawn to interior design, but the city didn't yet have that kind of program and my sister was practical about it in the way older sisters sometimes are. So I applied, a little late, to the art school in y city, Instituto Departamental de Bellas Artes, in Cali.

That first year, I had the opportunity to see both art and graphic design side by side, moving between drawing and color theory, clay modeling, art history and other very interesting classes, I was in heaven.

We drew. We studied color. We worked with clay and other materials. We had classes in art history and psychology. It was the kind of education that kept me creating and thinking. At the end of that year, I chose the graphic design path for what came next, and I did well. Well enough to earn a scholarship on the strength of my work for those semesters.  I really enjoyed it!

A very patriotic Colombian during the time we lived in Chile. 5-6 years old.

The Long Pause

I had never planned to let go of painting. But life has a way of accumulating so much - marriage, home, work, survival, and a weight of emotional and physical things I won't detail here. Painting became something that happened every now and then instead of something that was daily practice

Design became primary. Illustration found its way in through it like children's books I created with my sister long ago. But the sustained, evolving practice of painting that I had carried through childhood receded and became almost extinct. I think part of it was fear: painting demands that you grow, that you keep becoming interesting to yourself and to others. That is not a small ask.

The Divide

When I moved to Texas, the tension between these parts of myself became harder to ignore. It started becoming overwhelming. I think Covid did that for many… Wake up call!!! There was the designer. The illustrator. The painter. The artisan who made things with her hands. They felt like different people all living in different worlds. I even built two separate websites, one for the art, one for the design, like there was no connection and the only solution was to keep them from meeting.

What I couldn't see then was how obvious the connection was. It took me a few more years to see it.

It was funny, because it was obvious that I could find the union between all of it. It just wasn't obvious to me,not yet.

Showing of one of my paintings during our time in Chile. With my dad!!

Coming Together

In the last year anda half, or maybe even months something shifted. I began to see my work, all of it, as one thing expressed through many forms. Illustrations, paintings, handmade artisan work, prints and, of course, designs playing, finally, together. I think I had been in an internal fight with design because it felt it was taking away from the art side… They are not separate worlds. They are the same creative mind, reaching through different materials.

That is why I have one website now. One space that holds all of it. Not necessarily a perfect and tidy or strategic space, but a space that carries my truth and what is true. I am a designer and a painter and an illustrator and an artisan, and none of those things cancel out the others. They deepen each other and make my work and process so unique and such an adventure!

The “Lady with short and boots, about to get bitten by the spider” drawing is still in there somewhere. The child who drew a story from the waist down, who chose a frame and made a different conceptual decision, she really didn't go anywhere. She was just waiting for me to stop dividing things up.