Oil on canvas, 30″ x 40″

(I wanted to begin this description of this piece with words from the person for whom I designed and painted it, so that was one of his poems.)

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 “Be”

By Max Witkowski

“You’re special”

They say.

“Be an individual.”

Yet they oppress.

They control.

They frown upon creativity,

Upon imagination.

They restrict.

They pressure.

I am trapped.

There’s no way

To get away.

They misunderstand.

They assume.

And they wonder

Why I am

The way I am.

In my mind

I retaliate.

I tell them

“No,

Let me be.”

“Like it or not,

This is who I am.”

They can say

What they want.

They can do

What they want.

As long as

They let me be

Who I want.

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(And now I will give some of my words. On the day I graduated from college, about 2.5 years ago now, I wrote this:)

“The difference between being able to say, “Happy said 23 Solar Revolutions!” and “Happy 23rd Birthday!” is Max Witkowski.

The difference between Max Witkowski and Michaela Lozada is not so great that there are no alternative universes in which I am the one who never got to complete my twentieth circle around our sun.

(Today I will give a commencement speech at a convocation for the same Honors College which he had, at the same Rutgers University which he had. I would trade every commencement speech and convocation in the world to attend his 23rd birthday picnic today, instead of a ceremony which he never got to have.

The last time I saw him in person was when he came back to our high school to attend my graduation.)”

And still to this day I think, constantly:

Give him BACK

Give Max BACK

Give him Venice and Privilege and Peace and all the beautiful things you withheld from him, world

It knocks the air from my lungs to think of the moment in which one so gentle fell prey to demons so violent

GIVE HIM BACK

ACCIO MAX

Accio Max is dedicated to a very dear friend and one of the gentlest, most sensitive souls I’ll ever know. He also happened to be a genius with mathematics, the piano, languages, computer science, and baking. (A quintessential Ravenclaw.)

I finished this one on the Friday of November 10th, and it made its public debut the following Sunday at the Artists Against Violence Concert at the Newark Symphony Hall. This was prodigiously providential, as this venue couldn’t have been more fitting for him. I do apologize very sincerely for my delay in posting it here – there are many drawings and sketches backed up too, which I do promise I will get to you soon, dear Reader.

Take care, and ask for the damn help when you even think you might need it, because even if you think no one else loves you, I am presumably on the same planet as you, or at the very least the same universe as you, and I promise you I have the heartspace to feel and show love for you if you reach out to me in need, even if indeed a stranger you be,

Michaela

After-credits scenes:

Note 1 (note to Viewer): there ARE Easter eggs hidden in this one.

Note 2 (note to Self): what challenges were inherent to this piece para mi?

• Challenge 1: this was my first landscape ever
• Challenge 2: no sketching, projection, or any sort of underdrawing – just went in, brushes a blazing

Note 3 (note to Max): Max, send me book recommendations, please, through whatever signs are at your disposal now. Fiction preferred.

Кошмар (Koshmar)

01 February 2023 – 17 May 2023

Oil on canvas; over 2.2 meters by 2.4 meters (over 7 feet by 8 feet)

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The word “кошмар,” or “koshmar,” means “nightmare” in both Russian and Ukrainian. 

For instance, a Ukrainian speaker in Ukraine might have called it a “koshmar” when bombs fell on a Ukrainian maternity hospital in March 2022. Similarly, a Russian speaker in Russia might have called it a “koshmar” when all Russian H&M stores closed in November 2022. What a nightmare!

In my painting, the left hand figure of blue and white is based on a statue called “The Motherland Calls” in Russia. Excluding pedestals, it is the largest statue of a woman in the world.

The bottom right hand woman and child in my painting are inspired by images from the invasion of Ukraine. She is displaced, as you can see – her world has been turned upside down. 

Look at her face. A dreamscape unfolds before her eyes, but it is not the baby having a nightmare. 

So whose koshmar are we seeing, in which a frozen, isolated heart in a leaking snowglobe is also the moon, pulling the tides past nature’s limits, over homes and lands, flooding the Earth with disregard to all life?

In which a distant spectator sits and stares out from two perspectives, which are in truth only ever one perspective?

In which the massive wave of the Motherland calls and coils and roils with the spikes of a human heartbeat, a heartbeat which flatlines by the time the wave reaches a Mother?

KOSHMAR.

Look at her face.

Koshmar.

When I think of the Ukrainian women I have met and known thus far, I think of quiet strength. Defiance. Women who have been forced to leave Ukraine and who are directly affected by displacement, war, and cultural and literal genocide, have shown me casually, as a matter of fact, that they are not victims. 

One such woman told me, “I am not a refugee. I am a runner.” I asked her – “What did you mean?”

She laughed and explained that it was wordplay. She refused to adopt біженець, the Ukrainian word for refugee, which sounds like “bizhunets”, and instead reworked it to бігун, the word for runner, which sounds like “bihun.”

Now look back at the face of the mother in my painting. 

In her eyes and in how she clings tightly to her child, we can see a shell-shocked woman. 

She has been displaced. 

Her world has been turned upside down. 

However, she is a runner, not a refugee. She will make every sacrifice to protect her child from the ravages and realities of war.

And she knows that the dawn is coming.

As for the cry of the Motherland – an expression designed and molded by a man – look from this blue face to the face of the mother, and back again. 

“The Motherland Calls”? 

And yet I say that absent from this dramatic cry is the silent fire of truly fraught motherhood.

I think there’s a huge rift, a dichotomy, between the idea of the Motherland and real mothers on the ground, who are the ones who lose everything in a matter of seconds.

P.S. –

Question from the audience: “Who is the sitting figure in the back? The one drawn with white lines?”

I welcome others’ interpretations, but I painted the seated figure for two purposes:

1. It’s a clue that the background and the foreground show the same thing – just from two different perspectives at once. A flip, like a mirror, from the pivot point of the spectator. (Not unlike how the orientation of the heart and mother are clues to flip the work upside down.)

2. It brings into the frame observers of the conflict, sitting and watching and hearing about two different narratives, both written from a different perspective, but of the same events.

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Please take your time to process and enjoy Koshmar. If you or any others have any questions or would like to speak to me for any reason, please call or text me at (732) 991-9799 or email me at mlozada626@gmail.com. To view more of my work, please visit the rest of my website at michaelalozada.net.

I invite and encourage you to show my work to anyone whom you would like to share it with. All I ask is that you do not use any of my work to promote violence in any context, and that you credit the painter – Michaela Jane Lozada.

Samples of my sketches made from within church services.

During the first half of June of 2021, I had the privilege of traveling to Texas with my partner and friends.

Here is some of what it inspired!

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Over the course of the trip, while laughing and talking and waiting for our food in a restaurant, or singing together in a car ride, or in the quiet, still hours after my morning runs while everyone else was still asleep, I was also growing something more from my imagination than from my observation. I didn’t let myself use mirrors or photographs or other references. If I had to guess, I’d say that this composition grew primarily out of my mind’s eye and the afterimages of what my eyes were seeing over the course of the trip.

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---

Painted between November 3rd and 28th, 2020

Oil on canvas; over 10 feet wide, over 8 feet high

Fire!

In the Old Testament of the Bible of the Christian religion, there is a chapter of the Book of Exodus called “The Burning Bush.” The chapter describes how the Hebrew prophet Moses encounters a bush that is burning without being consumed. Moses then hears the voice of God emerge from this singular shrubbery, delivering unto Moses a mission to return to the land he fled from in order to lead his people out of oppression and into freedom.

This is quite a famous story in Christian teaching, and it has been told and illustrated in many ways and over many centuries.

I have had an uncomfortable amount of time to think in solitary silence during the quarantine of 2020, and in the vacuum of sound and fury, I find myself even more inclined than usual to become very curious about very odd things – such as the strange conundrum of a bush which burns yet is not consumed. 

I was snagged on strange details of this old story, and questions began to burn in my mind, questions which yielded no answers to consume in exchange.

For instance, why do no translations of Exodus ever mention any smoke? (Could this lack of output/smoke prove in a scientific sense that the fire really was not consuming any input/fuel?)

Why is God so cryptic – “I Am Who Am?” (That’s a nametag label which would give me pause in any circumstance, and I can’t imagine it offered Moses any clarification at the time.)

Why did God feel it necessary to call upon the services of an aging shepherd who had just abandoned the very people he was supposed to now save, to slavery in Egypt, in order to flee a murder charge (of which he really was guilty)?

Why did God abandon the very people He was now handing off to Moses to go save?

Why did He permit the act of slavery in the first place?

Why does He ever let anything bad happen?

Why is He letting 2020 happen?

I might still be happily locked in the cycle of asking unanswerable questions if I hadn’t begun to turn my line of questioning inward:

Is there an analog for the “burning bush” in my life?

What is it which sustains my will to work, even during the 21st century ice age which COVID-19 has triggered?

Whose voice is it which is still giving me purpose and mission as I sit alone in four cold, empty walls?

I sat and thought quite a lot.

Then, the sky opened up (with the aid of a little caffeine), and an answer finally plopped down.

The people in my life are my burning bush.

The people in my life sustain my will to work.

The people in my life are my purpose.

My mission.

As it was in my beginning, is now, and ever shall be –

Even as the world as I know it comes to an end.

I set to work, using the new fuel of my realization to push through COVID-prompted artistic inertia. For a little less than one full month of great intensity subsequent to my moment of clarity, I drew out the vision. I painted. I fought. I produced.

No smoke – just a Burning Bush.

During the act of creating this painting, I pushed myself more than I ever have before and climbed to higher heights than I had ever anticipated reaching. I made copious use of old family records, scaldingly hot chocolate, the score of the ballet Giselle, the work of the rap maestro known as Logic, all-natural vegan chewing gum, and the patience of my amazing mother, father, and brother. I sang beyond the standards of sanity, I got paint on every surface in my bedroom, and what I lost in sleep, I more than made up for in thought.

My guidebook was a copy of the Bible which had belonged to my Lolo – my father’s father, who survived World War II in the Philippines, worked to pay for even so much as a “public” high school education, immigrated to the United States, became an incredible doctor, married an incredible doctor, raised four beautiful sons, and practiced medicine in Queens until he contracted COVID-19 from a patient in March. His handwritten notes spurred my progress. Now, he lives on exclusively in these notes, in the people whose lives he has protected, in our memory, in our photos, and in my paint. See him for yourself next to his wife in the far-right of this canvas – my father grinning below.

I gave myself to this piece irresponsibly. I cut it pretty close, living and breathing my medium in a new way. My living situation entails that my studio setup is a turned-over toy chest with a bulletin board laid flat on it, with an empty plastic picture frame as my big fancy painter’s palette, in between my bed and my room’s largest wall – where I hung as large an expanse of canvas cloth as I could fit. This was the station at which I worked, and I couldn’t possibly be more grateful for it – for the ability to continue my work at all.

I did many things which I had never intended to do. In order to portray the figure on the left, I revisited the most painful form of entrapment which I have ever personally experienced – my scoliosis brace. I wore this plastic corset for sixteen hours a day for every day for over ten years of my life in order to prevent a back surgery which would forcibly straighten my S-shaped spine by fusing it into place with titanium rods and screws. (You can see the scar from that very surgery in the painting, denoted with a ray of vivid yellow light – which was all I could process when I emerged from the anesthetized fog of fifteen hours of back surgery. Just an overwhelming yellow light.)

The brace fit as though I had taken it off the day before, instead of some eight years before. It felt just as painful, too. I wore it for a while before taking any reference photos in it, so that I could catch just the right expression of pain and desperation. I painted my arms as they were in that moment – as I moved frantically to undo those three old straps, with the muscle memory of doing so thousands of times still remaining from years ago. I hope never to need to put my brace back on again.

This was a start – but after obtaining this image and painting myself into the piece, things took a wild turn.

Ask anyone who knows me, and they will tell you that my modus operandi as an artist is to plan out elaborate, enormous compositions, replete with hidden symbols and painstakingly-encoded messages. This is the way my prior two large pieces came into being.

However, I didn’t do that with this third large composition. I tried trusting my instincts, and praying fervently for the grace and the power to paint an impactful work. With minimal planning, I proceeded to work with a rigor which I have never been able to muster before. 

I still don’t understand, looking back after emerging from my month-long feverous haze, where the fervor came from. It’s easy to attribute a night of inspired work to a sad news article and some extra-potent coffee, but this was a marathon – not a sprint. I sustained my pace for the duration of this piece, and every night, I laid in bed five feet away from an entirely new image. This was the nature of my urgency – a fire.

I had the global pandemic at the forefront of my mind, and I was not fully conscious of recreating the flag of the Free Hong Kong pro-democracy movement. I was not fully conscious of mimicking that movement’s imagery and even the color scheme. I did not even realize the association until a few nights before Burning Bush was done. However, my support of Hong Kong is critical to my mission beyond even painting, and my heart constantly feels as though it is breaking for the people of Hong Kong during these times – so it makes absolute sense to me that even without intentionally recalling the visual themes of the movement, that even after not being directly exposed to them for months, they were at the forefront of my mind, and of course, my paints. When the memory resurfaced from some subconscious but obviously yet active part of myself, it hit me with the force of a column of wind and fire. I can only interpret this as one of many signs that my prayers for artistic guidance were heard.

Now, as I try to do what I can to draw out Burning Bush from my bedroom and to show it to as many eyes as I can, I still burn with questions, but also now with a new prayer.

I pray to meet you.

Every single one of you.

Everyone else, too – especially the ones who don’t have the patience to read this far!

I pray to the One who Is, Whoever They may Be, that when we are delivered from this 21st-century plague, that I get to meet you –

In person –

To shake your hand – 

To thank you for your time – 

And to pass you the torch…

For your Burning Bush.

Please take your time to process and enjoy Burning Bush. If you or any others have any questions or would like to speak to me for any reason, please call or text me at (732) 991-9799 or email me at mlozada626@gmail.com. To view more of my work, please visit the rest of my website at michaelalozada.net.

I invite and encourage you to show my work to anyone whom you would like to share it with. All I ask is that you do not use any of my work to promote violence in any context, and that you credit the creator – Michaela Jane Lozada.

• 

How much do you know about Filipino art? Not the art that natives and colonists made after the islands were conquered and converted – the art that sprung directly from the spirit of the people, before their islands were referred to as “the Philippines” (a title meant to honor King Philip of Spain).

I am half Filipino, half German, and I have access to a LOT of Germanic art. I have access to scores of family members here and in Germany who would love nothing more than to tell me all about their culture. Recently in considering this, I realized I knew nothing about the original art and cutlure of what are now called the Philippine islands. Neither does anybody I have asked. It’s not even mentioned in Rutgers University’s early world art history class. Assuming that people did exist in the early Philippine islands – and no one can dispute that they did – this is unacceptable to me.

I asked the experts – books and the Internet – and I found the information that was lacking. Among this information was one discovery of particular interest to me, called the “okir.” It one of the most integral forms of art to the islands’ original society, a recurring floral ornamental accent which seems intertwined with other patterns across the globe, suggesting in particular an Islamic influence. It was carved, painted, and drawn on everything from art to architecture, displayed as a symbol of the people’s pride in their culture and the pride of the artisans in their craftsmanship. Essentially, the okir was created and adopted by the native people as a proud display of the spirit of their society. The okir shines with the light of the passion, the pride, the patriotism of these people; however, it has been eclipsed from the view of most of the world.

“Lozadas” is my riposte to this repression. The faces you see are representatives of as many generations of my family as I could find. The pattern which is projected onto is a rendering of the okir. After studying occurances of the okir in surviving artifacts, I recreated a version of my own. I then used digital means to colorize the pattern, matching the exact color palettes of okir patterns found on the artifacts I’d studied.

Like the Philippines, my last name (“Lozada”) is of Spanish origin. It means “to light up” or “illuminate.” Please enjoy.