We recently connected with Luis Miguel Anaya and have shared our conversation below.

Luis Miguel, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I am lucky to have found art and painting. People spend their whole lives searching for meaning and I am happy to have found it at a young age. I spent my childhood and adolescence playing football or soccer. Art had never had a second thought in my head besides movies and the doodles in my notebooks. I quit playing football in my third year of college and I was a bit lost. I had lost my first passion, my first love. Everything had some relation to the sport up to that point in my life and it left a giant void in when it was gone. I had already enjoyed reading as a teenager and watching movies, but to me that’s all they were. Things you did, not things that gave life deeper meaning, but I got really into French cinema and it opened a whole new world to me. The simplicity of the shots and stories, but they had real depth and beauty to them. The sincere dialogue not in tune with the fairytales you grow up watching. It gave my life a different perspective that went hand in hand with what I love in life. Intensity and story telling. This eventually led me to branch out until I stumbled upon a biography about Vincent Van Gogh, and my life changed forever. Van Gogh’s intelligence and unrivaled search for love and beauty really spoke to me. I thought to myself, that is what I want to do. Paint. After graduating college with a degree in biology, I taught myself to draw and expanded my knowledge on art. Then, I started painting and I fell in love, It is what I want to do and what I see myself doing for the rest of my life.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am Luis Miguel Anaya. I am a Mexican born painter, who grew up in Michigan. I played football/soccer from the age of 6 to 21 at a competitive level. I studied biology in college with the intention of pursuing medical school, until I read a book about Van Gogh and decided that I wanted to be a painter instead. I work with oil paint, and my artistic goals are to show the world how I see it. My goals with my art are authenticity. I am not interested in creating what people want to see or what they will enjoy. Rather I seek thoughtful creation of the combination of different ideas that I have to represent MY world. That said, there is a common human experience that we all share, and by sharing my world people I think people can relate to that experience. I do not have a background in art and it has been a difficult journey trying to break into a difficult field, but I believe if you are true to yourself the work will speak for itself and people will take notice. I think what has really helped me stand out is the fact that I am myself around everyone. I do not put on a front in order to make people like me more or listen to me. I believe people can see that I wear my heart on my sleeve and they appreciate it, That is what I’m most proud of. The fact that the experiences I have lived have not changed who I really am.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

My goals go beyond me. I want to leave something behind that will inspire people after to me to follow their heart and continue to search for their own meaning. I do not want to be older in age for people to appreciate what I do, I want to be young while I become known to have a real time impact. Which can be lost with the passage of time. I want to help people through my art. There is potential to make money doing what I love, and the money I make I want to give back to not only artist, but students who want to pursue academics. I believe there is enough to go around and I want to be part of that cycle of help.
My artistic goals are to express my world in the purest way I can. Through study and investigation of color, light, and figure. I want to be myself and for people to remember me for that. Life is difficult and it is a daily process of learning. It has been an interesting process learning who I am as an artist. I don’t feel like just an artist. I want to reach beyond that. The longer I paint, the less I feel like a painter. I am much more inspired by philosophy, civil rights activists, and people seeking to make change for the better. I think that is much more inspiring than some of the artists famed for their work. That is not to say that I am not obsessed with learning about different painters and their work, but I have such respect for people with the mental capacity to voice what they think for the advancement of people. There is still much for us to do and create a future worth living.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I want people to understand my background as an athlete and student. I genuinely enjoyed studying for my biology degree and I think it is engrained in how I make my art. I say this, because I am a very logical person. It can be difficult for non-creatives to understand why someone like me, that could have had a successful career in something more stable, would want to be an artist in this day and age. I myself had to accept that fact when I started. I understood that if I chose the path of an artist I would struggle with stability. It isn’t easy and it weighs heavy on a person having to struggle week by week, but REAL art is worth it. What I feel and understand about the world and life through my journey as an artist is priceless. The people I have met and talked to, and the places I have been are incredible. I would not change the path I chose for that stability, because what I lost in those facets of life I gained in others. I want people to understand that being a real artist is more than just what you create, it is a life built around genuine search for expression of who we are. Both are needed for the world and we should work together instead of separately. I feel as a society we have lost a large sense of community and I want to help bring that back. It gets hard sometimes to believe in positive change, but we need to at least try.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.luismiguelanaya.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/luismianaya/

Image Credits
Saru,  Dayton Doucette, and Luis Anaya