About Erica Velasco

Though primarily photographic artist, Erica Velasco’s forays into painting have yielded visually engaging abstract works blanketed in deep color and striking mixed media ornaments. Though abstract in nature, Velasco’s works are never bereft of form often resembling celestial objects such as constellations and heavenly gates. Utilizing layered patterns and flowing textures, Velasco’s paintings strive to compile various media into aesthetically gratifying images. Luxurious hues such as metallic gold and royal purple form sprawling skies, canyons, and nature scapes that appear both above and below the viewer’s point of view. Through the use of organic figures and line work, Velasco creates pieces derived from her thematic inspirations such as forrestial brush, running water, the luminous night sky, and even the microbial entities that call our bodies home. Though these points of reference often find themselves abstracted by the time Velasco’s finished paintings are ready for display, such experimentation contributes to her development as an artist and an inhabitant of our vast cosmos.  


Artist Statement

Erica Velasco is primarily a photographic artist who also has an interest in painting. Her photography is very involved with the ideas of identity and narrative. She tries to tell a story subtly through her explorations of the human body and an individual’s emotions or bluntly and directly through the use of theatrical sets and costumes. Her paintings can be viewed as very abstract in nature. She is interested in the elements of color and texture and how these principles work together to create something aesthetically pleasing. She takes a lot of inspiration from the natural world or even the human body, and these influences can be seen in her work. She uses organic shapes and lines to create pieces that find their inspirations in themes like nature, water, the night sky, and even cells within the body. However these starting points find themselves heavily abstracted in the paintings themselves. She believes that her photographs and paintings can inform each other and that experimenting in both can make her a stronger and more aware artist.