Erika Alonso’s childhood in Southern California, is a place she often “escapes” while painting. She is experimenting in abstract expressionism through a series of, abstract-figurative-landscape paintings that are meant to capture a moment in all of its fleetingness—the movement and rush and whirl of it

The artist describes her work as an escape from reality:

“My paintings are just places I’d like to spend my time. Places that are pleasantly stimulating, enchanting, complex, and consistently inconsistent.”

My paintings are my inner-world, full of creatures and beings and feelings, as lines and shapes and color. My process starts without intention or goal, only emotion infused with energy. I paint quickly and all at once — chasing a glimpse in the paint, charcoal or ink. I am always on the edge of losing my train of thought. The intuitive aspect of my process comes through as figures emerging, receding then appearing, perhaps slightly different than before. The result is comforted at the interstices between abstraction and figuration: painterly swirls of color, lyrical lines, a watchful eye in the sky, windows as escape hatches, reflection pools, cascading flowers and persons, birds, snakes, and animals of all kinds.