We recently connected with Florentino and have shared our conversation below.

Florentino, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Every painting is always practice, I always continue to learn. Artist get better with every painting, it’s all about consistency. All practice. My work gets more distorted every year and it has helped me become a better artist. Working through all the distortion and texture can be challenging. My latest work has a lot of texture and I feel it has become a very important detail to my style. I would say that’s the most essential skill I’m developing right now, learning to control the texture to flow perfectly with my piece. Like where to add the texture, how thick and what not. All depending on the piece I’m working on. With texture I sure have made a lot of mistakes, but with mistakes I learn.. As in artist you have to be thankful for mistakes sometimes. It’s what makes you better.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Florentino, I’m an artist from Dallas, TX raised in Oak Cliff. Before becoming a full-time artist I did insurance for years but only painted every now and then as a hobby. I’ve done art my whole life but my work wasn’t noticed till I started painting around 2011, everything before that was just color pencil and marker work. Friends and family suggested Instagram for my work so I opened an account. At first it was only for fun, never intentionally post it to sell my work. After a few posts my DMs started flooding with messages asking for prices of my paintings. Back then I had no idea how to price my work. I remember I would always respond with “how much would you pay”? And whatever they offered I took because I thought it was just crazy someone wanted to buy my work. After a just a few months I got so busy with commission work and art shows that I quit my job and pursued my career as a artist. In the beginning my work was all anime, cartoon characters, and stuff like that. As the years passed my style would always transition to something drastically different than what I was doing last. I’m a big fan of the 16th and 17th century clothing so my latest work is mostly inspired by they era. I’ve been doing more texture work and my recent paintings and I feel that’s what makes me stand out. I use the texture to my advantage and have a blast with a pallet knife. When people see my work I want them to feel the need to run their fingers my paintings, I want that texture to pull them in.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

One thing for sure is to never undersell yourself, as in artist you should know the worth of your craft. I’ve crossed many people trying to pay for my work with “exposure”. I’m always open to negotiate prices and work with peoples budgets. But there have been a few I have quoted and they have the nerve to say they deserve a discount or sometimes even say for free because of the amount of followers they have. They’ll say stuff like, “Once I post your work on my page you’re gonna get more customers”. Stuff like that. But I will say that I have made that mistake in the beginning of my career of doing some work for “exposure”. Until this day for every time I did it for exposure I have not got nothing out of it. So that was definitely a lesson learned. Exposure is definitely not a way of payment

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

For me any time I make a sale it’s a reward. I give it my all in all my paintings, they’re basically all chapters of my life. And I know my stuff isn’t cheap, so when someone buys a painting from me it means the world to me. It makes me feel they had a connection with the piece just as I did. It’s a great feeling. Grateful each time.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: florentinoartwork
• Facebook: Florentino Artwork
• Other: TikTok: florentinoart