My Way of Loving Art Was Never Through Technique

There are things that seem so obvious that they can spend decades right in front of our eyes without ever truly being seen.

I just realized one of those things about myself.

I realized that the most genuine way I connect with art is through feeling. That is it. Not through technique, complexity, innovation, or intellectual recognition. It is through what art makes me feel in my body.

And I am genuinely laughing while writing this because it feels like a huge revelation and, at the same time, the most obvious thing in the world.

The other day I was talking with someone about Beatles songs and mentioned some of my favorites. The response was something like: “but those are some of their simplest songs.” And I realized that I truly did not care. Because I do not love those songs for being technically brilliant or revolutionary. I love them because they make me feel things.

I can listen to Here Comes the Sun and it is literally impossible for me to stay depressed while hearing it.

It is not even about the lyrics. It is the rhythm, the sensation, the emotion, something that happens inside me.

And then I connected this to books.

A little while ago I finished a book by Socorro Acioli that I read almost in one sitting. I completely disappeared into the story. And I realized this happens to me a lot with Latin American writers, especially those with elements of magical realism. Gabriel García Márquez, for example, is one of my favorite writers. I enter the rhythm of the narrative and simply vanish into it.

On the other hand, I have been trying to read To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, and it has been a completely different experience. The book was even partially swallowed by the sea after I got distracted at the beach, and it is still here now, dry, slightly warped, waiting for me to pick it up again.

It is not that I do not find it interesting. I do. But it does not pull me in emotionally in the same way. There is no impulse. No sensation of being carried away by the story. It feels more intellectual.

And that was when everything clicked.

I choose art by the way it makes me feel.

Always.

Painting too.

I love gigantic paintings because they make me feel things. I love certain colors, textures, certain works that emotionally move through me. And I realized it was never about technique.

At the same time, as an artist, I have a complicated relationship with that.

There are still parts of me that think:

“But I do not have formal training.”

“I do not know technique.”

“I do everything intuitively.”

“Most of the time I would not even know how to recreate what I just did.”

But suddenly, a nearly comical realization hit me:

If I, as someone who experiences art, do not value technique above everything else… why do I demand that from myself in order to validate my own art?

Why would I measure my artistic value through criteria that are not even the ones through which I myself feel emotionally moved?

And this opened something very big inside me.

Because I realized that what connects me to art was never perfection. It was feeling.

It always was.

And the funniest part in the middle of all this is that in the Socorro Acioli book I just finished, Saint Anthony appears constantly as a central figure. And since I was little, I have had a tiny prayer I say every time I lose something:

“Saint Anthony, light, light.”

I repeat it until I find whatever I lost.

And suddenly I feel like laughing because it genuinely feels like I just found something that had been sitting under my nose for 39 years.

The most important thing of all.

My true way of loving art.