My grandmother Faride wasn’t even Portuguese. My mother described her as the equivalent of an American Anglophile; she was a Brazilian who loved Portugal – a Lusophile. She was Lebanese, born in Brazil, moved to the US at the age of 35 after a breakup, and found my maternal grandfather, a Portuguese man.

My grandparents had a hand in my introduction to Portuguese culture and ceramics – growing up, we would travel to Portugal, walk around Lisbon, and stay in my grandparents’ apartment – decorated in painted pottery from Sintra and Coimbra. Portugal is also known to have historically beautiful tilework; a stunning signature in their architecture that began with the invasion of the Moors in the 700s ( I could go off on this subject, but I shall refrain).

When I wasn’t on my luxury vacation in Portugal with my whole family staying in an apartment with just 3 beds, I would be in New Jersey, where we would visit Grandma Faride every other week. Her house was exactly what you would expect from a woman in her 90s living alone – dusty ornate rugs, heavy fabric curtains, Jesus iconography (we once counted over 25 images of Jesus and no more than 10 total of all 3 grandkids), and, of course, decorative plates on the walls.

Unusual-looking deer hopping through a flat floral scene, a regal bird centered in a frame of mysterious seeded fruit – this is what I would see hung on the kitchen wall as I picked away at my chicken thighs. Now, why is it that every old person has decorative plates and nobody under 35 does? In case you haven’t guessed, I am not a subscriber to the chic minimalist design so present in American culture today. The more I talk about my obsession with the plates, the more clearly it is tied to a warm feeling of comfort, nostalgia, and love that comes with eating dinner at a table with your family. Those plates were always there to look at, so my interest obviously stems from a place of knowing, and extends into curiosity about Portuguese ceramics in general.

I also started getting really seriously into pottery in 2023 and realized I could mix cobalt oxide with ball clay to get a wash that has a similar look to the Portuguese tiles on my own work. Before I moved to NYC I had an insane amount of resources I wish I had taken advantage of more to make original artwork. But ALAS! My ideas remain in my head, besides a few experimental pieces I made. I would also soon visit Portugal, go to a traditional ceramic factory, and see that they paint wet on wet, which is INSANE to me.

Portuguese tiles are so similar to quilts; it’s alarming when you realize it for the first time. I mean, obviously, they are repeating patterns that look good on a big scale. There is often a border. They are both used as decoration and for utilitarian purposes. I love that intersection. I was also a little disappointed when I thought I had come to a genius conclusion, then my sketches of a tile pattern that looked like a quilt ended up looking like just tiles. Vice versa, my sketch of a quilt that had Portuguese tile motifs and colors still kinda just looked like an ordinary quilt.

As an artist, you are always trying to make something that stands out and pushes the boundaries – this is what we are taught to do. This is what we are taught is great. If something looks like an ordinary quilt, is it magnificent? Supposedly, anyone can make a quilt. In Western culture, individuality is glorified. We are taught that there is a difference between “art” and “craft”. Being accessible and universal, a blanket, fabric, and sewing are all known to be a “craft”. There is a museum for quilts, and a museum for fine art. In the museum for fine art, only recently can one see a display of quilts made by great American artists like Bisa Butler and Faith Ringgold, to name a few. And going back to grasping at straws with my own identity, their art uses traditional craft to root themselves further into a rich and complex history of being a Black American woman.

For me, quilting/ pattern-making obviously has a different context, though not disconnected from tradition and femininity. I associate it with my grandma Helen, who, despite being born in the USSR, spent her formative years in a war camp in Germany. I asked her once about her professional-level sewing ability, and she said it began in the war camps – a teacher recognized her attention to detail and skill during a sewing class, and gave her more complicated patterns.

Although she moved here in her early teens, I see my grandma as foreign, and her craft as foreign, even though she’s told me she learned much of what she knows here in the US. I like to believe that the special ability my grandma has is some magical trait that came out of her as a survival skill or an inherited gene. As a child, she taught me how to crochet. She has made hundreds of doilies, clothes, and magnificent crocheted and knitted items, and when I ask her how she does it, she says, “It’s just a pattern!” She is not a big quilter, but she loves patterns – she is a mathematician and computer scientist by profession. To me, she is also an artist who defies a regular joke my artist friends and I make – we are not good at math.

Like most things I do, I got into quilting and sewing the past few years for a purely self-serving purpose – why buy it if I can make it? I wanted to make a skirt, a tote bag, a quilt – called Grandma. She tells me it’s not going to look good at first, that like painting, you acquire a skillset over time. Ugh, she’s so wise. And I am impatient. And since I cannot use the ceramics studio to make my tiles anymore, I guess I will have to make a quilt that looks like a Portuguese tiled wall that looks like a quilt. I have considered block printing fabric and sewing an amateur quilt that way, so that the patterns look like Azulejos AND I can use it. The problem with fine art these days, though, is if you want to use it, it suddenly loses value.

With the rise of the fascination with the “trad wife”, old quilts have become more expensive over the past few years, and rightfully so. And so once again, I’m drawn back to this idea that quilts, so universally, are utilitarian, beautiful, feminine, and underrated pieces of artwork. Emphasis on artwork!

But just now I had another thought that made me wince – have I fallen into a trend? Am I overly aware of my interest in uncovering a truth about my identity through “crafts”? Should I pivot to draw attention to the high-low nature of art/“crafts”? I don’t like to think too deeply like this about my artwork before I make it. Some may say that’s impulsive, but isn’t the best artwork always a little sporadic? And by keeping myself from overthinking like this, I am less disappointed when the final result is far from what I wanted. I like to go with the flow, which is why my preferred medium at this very moment wouldn’t have anything to do with tiles or quilting; it would be a lump of clay, a wheel, and no idea what I’m going to do with it until I touch it.

I’d like to use the visuals that I associate with my family history to be part of my artwork, even if it’s not linear– and I think I can leave it at that. I am proud to have grandparents who all have or had accents and gave me bits and pieces of culture to further investigate. Inevitably, whenever I make art, it is an exploration of my identity. My upbringing in the suburbs of New York, my exposure to fine art, the way I look, my name, my visits to my grandparents’ places; all of it affects how I interact with the world, and in turn, how the world will see what I produce.

After all, if it’s an identity issue, that’s deeper work. Faride was a Catholic whose parents emigrated from Lebanon to Brazil, then she from Brazil to the US. And I associate her somehow with the artwork rooted in the colonizing country of her birthplace? Then there’s Helen, born in Odesa, Ukraine, who had Belarusian and Romanian roots but identifies as Russian? Damn, being an American is a mess. I was hoping that writing down my motivation around Azulejos and quilts, I would be hit with a new idea, but now I’m just questioning what I really know about my family history. My idea of it is certainly skewed; I definitely add some elements of magical realism when I picture it. Maybe I should just stick to abstract art.

The print was born as an offshoot of a very successful print I made in 2015. I’ve never sold as many copies of something as I have of that print – my “Koitet”. I believe what was missing in the frog band was the passion from the time in my life when I created the fish print. Sure, the frogs are whimsical; they have passion, they’re playing in a rock band, and the idea is that it’s an image where they’re at the peak of a very emotional (popular?) song of theirs. But that carving lacked a passion from me. The original image just isn’t as feeling as Koitet, and so maybe that’s why the mural could never really reach the level I wanted it to.

I do feel good about it though. I feel good about having executed it professionally and in a timely manner despite the rain in July. I feel good about the brushes, paint, and methods I used, which I learned from the muralists at AOTA fest this past winter. I also feel powerful in knowing how I can streamline it next time I do a mural. And yes, I was indeed glad to give these frogs a new life; it was a little chaotic as a print, not as detailed as my original drawing, and it looks so much better as a painting! There are lots of reasons to feel good about my first mural; my bank account sure feels some relief. When I really force my mind towards the positive, I start to feel pretty fucking great actually, because I quit my job to focus on my own art and within a month I was found and trusted by a local to paint a mural (and not to mention, made more than I would in over a month at the job I quit, so fuck that job and hell yeah to me!).

But whatever I do next, it will have to be more aligned with my current practice. I liked the frogs, and my client says it was just what she was looking for; silly, colorful, and she called me a genius, which of course felt like way too high praise… but you know, I blushed. Something about choosing a work from a time in my life when I felt uninspired agitated me at my core. I probably sold … ten of that frog print? Total? And many of those went to people I loved who got the family and friends discount. The frogs never compared to my fish print, and that’s actually why I made it in the first place– to sell sell sell dozens of them, like a printmaking machine, and make the big bucks, as I did with my Koitet. I’ve made dozens of reprints of those fish. It’s old to me, but if I had a stand at an art market, I think people would still buy it out. It’s got a dynamic flow that only water or sky creatures have (maybe that’s why I print birds and fish so much), and it also came out of a place of redirected feelings that I do not talk about.

When I was making the print “Koitet” in 2015, I was actively being broken up with by my high school boyfriend and processing my parents’ divorce. Yes, the two things happened during summer break when I was at home in close physical proximity to all of them for the first time in a while. Sure, the signs were there for both relationships: my parents were clearly platonic, and my boyfriend and I didn’t communicate well at all. I mean, the lack of affection was incredibly obvious in both loves, and maybe it was because of how obvious it was that it hit me harder. I had spent my life refusing to acknowledge the reality of my parents’ relationship, and clearly was using the same avoidance in my own. I was 19 years old, had yet to start Lexapro or any anti anxiety/ depression meds, and I was doing what I knew best, because I was dealing with something I knew nothing about.

In retrospect, the hours at my desk carving away the little spots on the fish almost feel like a powerful deflection of reality. Art is an outlet, yes, but I’ve only just begun to consider it to be a means of distraction. I was putting my all into that print; I didn’t know how to communicate my issues, so I hyperfocused on something I knew I could do well. I remember looking up pictures of a flute and making sure the violin looked accurate. The composition had a good balance of busy and blank space. I feel like I spent a lot of time carving those little lines because if I stopped, I would have to think about the failed marriage that I based my own romantic future on. And if I brought it up with my boyfriend, he wouldn’t know how to respond (we were teenagers, yes, but he was also weirdly unsympathetic for someone whose mother was a therapist)

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Anyway, I spent part of my summer making that print, and when I went back to school (where I was miserable, by the way) in the fall, I remember someone kinda random complimenting it in line at the dining hall. I decided to sell it, and it’s been my most popular print to date. That was over 10 years ago!

So maybe now you understand why, when my client looked through my Instagram and showed so much enthusiasm for my little frog band, and I told her I could scale it up, I felt both fantastic and conflicted. Fantastic because I would be getting PAID to do something I LOVE and want to spend my LIFE doing, AND I already had a design for it! Conflicted because this print didn’t do nearly as well as I hoped it would, and I don’t ever want to wean off my antidepressants or experience a new kind of heartbreak in order to make good art.

I don’t think I have to do that. And I don’t think my only good art comes from feeling helpless. As I am always saying, you have to make 100(,000) bad things to make one good one. And the client and I both agreed that those frogs are pretty damn good, even if they are playing into the void of an alleyway at the edge of Astoria. The next project I intend to do will include some of the motifs I’ve been obsessed with recently: quilt patterns, Portuguese ceramic designs (like weird animals and Azulejos), human figures, and the dream-like combination of all of those things. Oh, and I plan on doing a (reasonably sized) free mural for exposure, so if you know anyone who wants that… you know where to find me.