The art she creates, the way that she expresses herself in her paintings, inspired an audio engineer and music producer to contact Marianela de la Hoz about the possibility of collaborating on a project together. “I admit that I was afraid because he is so famous in his field. He has won three Gra mmys and has been seven times nominated for the Grammys, so I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s a star,’ but he’s such a lovely person, very grounded,” she says of Marc Urselli, who she worked with to create “Palpitations: The Cadence of Heartbeat,” on display at the San Diego Museum of Art through Feb. 22. “The collaboration went easy and we had both had a lot of freedom to each make our best work.” It was a trip to San Diego and the museum in 2021 that led Urselli to de la Hoz’s solo exhibition, “Paintings from the Confinement,” responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. She says he told her that he loved her paintings and was interested in working on something together. They needed something that could be used for sound and for her paintings, and decided on sound cones. De la Hoz would paint her images on the cones, and Urselli would create soundscapes to accompany the paintings. It was a challenge that required a departure from her long-time use of egg tempera, a method involving a mixture of egg yolk, powdered pigments, and water, allowing her to achieve the level of detail she loves to do. She revisited her acrylics, oils, and colored pencils because the sound coming through the sound cones would crack paintings made with egg tempera. It worked and she mailed the first one to Urselli in New York, where he began creating the sounds to go with her work. The result is a collection of images animated by the vibrations of sound. De la Hoz, 69, is an award-winning artist whose work has been in dozens of solo and group exhibitions, and in private and public collections all over the world. She lives in Vista with her husband, Raul Alba, and took some time to talk about this collaboration with Urselli, finding the courage to leave a corporate career and become a professional artist, and working to create images that captivate and surprise. Q: What kinds of conversations did you and Marc have about how you wanted to approach the pieces for this exhibition? A: So, the object was found, the media as well, and then we were discussing how to find the thread to make this exhibition a whole message. We were thinking that vibrations and using the palpitations of our hearts, the real heart in every human, in every living being, as a symbol because art has this heart—the palpitation in a book you’re reading, the palpitation in a painting, in music, everything has these palpitations. We decided that every painting would have a heart in different ways, in different meanings, different messages, but the heart was the one that would be in all of the pieces of the show. Q: Why palpitations and heartbeats? What is meant by the decision to focus on the rhythm of this organ? A: We thought about how every living thing has this sound, so it went very well with Marc and his work because every vibration that he would bring to the sound cones can relate to the palpitation of the heart. For me, the heart was the perfect symbol to paint, in many ways. It has a lot of meanings. For instance, one of the pieces is about war and I depicted Mother Earth with a big heart that has been stabbed. She is displaying her robe and you can see all the holes that bullets have made on her body, but then you see the heart in a newborn baby. He’s inside of a heart and he’s surrounded by a new galaxy, new stars, because we all begin our lives with our own big world, our own stars and galaxies and everything else. So, there’s a war, and on the other side of the galley, you have a utopian peace because everyone wants peace. It’s a utopia because we, as human beings, will never have complete peace in this world. You have a heart with chrysalis, and a man and a woman face to face, and instead of bullets, you have seeds and butterflies and the sounds are to confront it. With this piece, you have sounds of nature—you have birds and you have beautiful sounds of a harp. With war, you have the sounds of bullets and cries and sounds of war. What I love about Vista… I love Vista because it’s quiet. My neighbors are wonderful, there’s a lot of green, of plants, of flowers. I feel secure. The light that I have where I think, it’s beautiful, it’s golden. The place is beautiful, I love it.  Q: What were you thinking about when it came to figuring out what you wanted to paint? What you wanted each image to be, to communicate? A: My creative process, it begins always by writing first, so when we decided that the heart was the common symbol for every painting, I began writing which themes would I love to address with my paintings. I have always worked with duality—it’s always light and shadows, life and death, etc. I decided that the principal work of this of this exhibition is a triptych and the title is “The Tree of Life and Death, from Cradle to Tomb.” I depicted a baby that’s newly born, then the next painting of the triptych is a tree of life and death, so it’s very detailed with little characters, ones that are life and ones that are death. The third piece is the same character that was born before, and he has grown up. The last piece depicts the same character in a casket and the sound that Marc developed is the same story, but with sounds. For instance, the baby, when he’s born, you can listen to the cry of a baby. Then, you listen to the sounds of the city, cars, nature, and the last one is in a hospital and you can listen to the heartbeats that are getting slower and slower until it does the beeep. The flatline. Q: You were born in Mexico, earning a bachelor’s degree in graphic design there in 1978. Can you talk a bit about your life growing up in Mexico? Where did you grow up and how would you describe the relationship to art that you had in your home, with your family? A: Yes, I was born and raised in Mexico City. I went, all my life, to an all-girl nun school; it was horrible. Now, I’m happy because many of my images and my way of thinking comes from that. I decided when I was going to the university, I wanted to be an artist. I have always wanted to be an artist. Since I can remember, I was a child with cardboard and pencils in my hand. I learned to read very early in my life, 3 years old. I am a voracious, voracious reader, so literature has been a main source for my imagination, for my image of the world, but I was a coward because instead of going to art school, my parents convinced me that I would starve if I studied art. So, I decided to study graphic design. They told me, “It’s the same.” In Mexico, this was when graphic design was a very new career, so there were no computers, everything was done by hand. I learned a lot, not about painting, but I learned to think; I learned to translate all of the things you wanted to say with symbols, with visual things. When I had my second child, I decided that I was very frustrated with graphic design; I made good money, but I wanted to say something about myself. With graphic design, a client would say, ‘I want this, I want that. I want this color.’ I wanted to say the things and I didn’t want to follow this career anymore. When my second child was born, I decided to try because I was going to stay one year at home taking care of my baby, and I painted my first serious painting. It took a year to finish it and I thought that if I liked it, then I would renounce my graphic design career. I kept it under my bed and when I finished it, I decided, yes, this is what I wanted to be in my life. From that day on, I have been a professional painter, a visual artist. Q: What kind of influence has your upbringing, your culture, had on the art that you create? A: My parents and my grandparents came from different places in Europe, so my upbringing was from Spain, from France and, of course, Mexican folk culture, which is absolutely something that I always use. For instance, you were asking about the heart and in Mexico, the heart is a must for everybody. Everybody understands that it’s a figure that we use for everything in Mexico. When my parents were about to marry, my father inherited a big library, a collection of books from my great-grandfather. I remember that, at my house, nobody read those books but me. It was incredible because those books opened my imagination, my baggage, my culture, my fountain of symbolism, my everything. I’m full of those memories, of those books because there were many books of art-I found (Hieronymus) Bosch, the painter, I found Goya, I found William Blake. That was my main food for the soul and for the heart. Q: On your website, you say “My task is to observe the world around me and then translate this image of the world by transforming it into a world of images. I better understand my interior world by carefully observing the outer world, and vice-versa, I better understand the world around me via careful self-observation.” I’m curious about your perspective on how you’re observing the outer world around you currently. What are you seeing and thinking about? A: I am a very shy person and I am not very good with words, but the way I function is observing, observing, observing, trying to understand what I’m seeing, and then translating it into images. To try to be seen by other people that, maybe, will find an explanation to their own feelings. Right now, I am very sad, I am very worried. I see the world with a very big, black cloud over us. I don’t know what will happen. I am very worried about my grandchildren, I am worried about my children; I am old, so not very much for me, but I think the world is rapidly changing so much and I cannot understand, and I cannot digest, all the changes that I can see. I try, with my work, little by little, to say something about what I’m seeing. Q: How is what you’re observing communicating to you internally? Helping you understand yourself in this time? A: (It is) helping me understand that I want to be true to myself. That I don’t want to believe everything that I read in the news, that I hear. I don’t like this media, which is treacherous. I don’t have the trust I used to have in all the books, in the images. Now, I don’t trust anybody; I trust my friends, my loved ones, but the world is, I don’t know. It’s upside down. Also, I’m very afraid about artificial intelligence. I think that it’s a very good tool for many instances, for all humans for medical issues, for astronomy, for industry, I don’t know. But for art? Please, don’t come near me. I think that it would be like a vampire that would take my creativity and I don’t need that. Every piece that I paint, it takes at least one month to finish it, and I love that process. I love to have a conversation with a character I’m depicting. I love to take my time. It’s like a chef doing sauce reduction, slow cooking. That’s the beauty of this process and I don’t want to do many paintings rapidly, next, next, next. No, I don’t want to. Q: What is the best advice you’ve ever received? A: Every work of art, treat it as if it would be the last you are doing. Q: What is one thing people would be surprised to find out about you? A: I think that the surprise is that, as my work is small and very detailed, it allows the people to approach the paintings and say, ‘Ah, that’s lovely. How detailed,’ but when their eyes are trapped by the painting and they can see the meanings—because there are many meanings, layers of meanings in my paintings—then they are surprised. They say, ‘Oh, I thought it was mellow. It was sweet,’ and then they say, ‘Oh my God, what is this?’ Q: Please describe your ideal San Diego weekend. A: My ideal day, seven days a week, will be staying at home because I live secluded, I am like medieval scribe, and to have the time to paint. That’s my heaven. ...read more read less