We recently connected with Rebeca Sanchez Montero and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Rebeca thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

Being an artist is all about taking a risk. I feel like I’m an expert on this subject since I grew up as a child of immigrants. My parents came to this country taking a risk in their lives. Taking a risk to start a family. Taking a risk on hope. My wanting to be an artist was taking a risk on my parents who didn’t understand it, let alone care about it. This lifestyle choice was a slap to my parents who were not supportive…at first. However did I have the courage to stand up to the two people I love the most, who sacrificed their livelihood, crossed the border to a land unknown, leaving their family behind to create a hopeful future of possibilities for their children just to be told their child wants to paint and draw forever? And yes as cliche as it sounds, as an immigrant child, you just don’t do that. Was that risk worth it? Yes. Yes, it was. I opened a whole door of possibilities, that my parents didn’t know existed for people like us. This resilience and hope is what I learned from my parents and is what I bring with me to my work. When I dive into my work, I have to learn to be vulnerable with myself to be okay with mistakes, to go through trial and error, and to be open to exploring outside of my comfort zone. This leads to my work that touches on topics of culture and identity.

Rebeca, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a Los Angeles-based artist and a California State University of Long Beach graduate, receiving my BFA in Drawing and Painting as well as a Single Subject Teaching Credential in Art. I am currently a high school art teacher.

I was brought to Los Angeles at six months old from Mexico. I grew up speaking English at school, speaking Spanish at home, while seeing many cultures around me. Growing up in LA exposed me to the Angelino lifestyle and a mix of a multitude of cultures around the world. That amalgamation of energy, people, and environment creates the base for my work. I am inspired by the architecture and color of cities I have visited and lived in. I take moments I witness from my everyday life as a form of documentation to create this intuitive accumulation of complex cityscape and bustling life of the cities around me. I want to recreate the feeling of walking down the street and seeing all the energy around you passing by while capturing the moments I remember walking the same streets from childhood. I am currently building a new body of work that expands on this idea with the city of my upbringing and combining my ancestral land of Mexico.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

There’s always that pressure of perfection and completion before moving on to the next thing. This is something that I have been struggling with as an artist. This idea has stopped me from making work in the first place. I will jump from one painting to another, intimidated to continue, that I forgot that joy of experimentation I had. Last year I was struggling with my mental health, which is something I’m still trying to understand, and I felt it decreased my motivation, What helped was seeing the Keith Haring show at the Broad and the Peachtober prompts (created by Sha’an d’Anthes, an Australian artist/illustrator/author) in October. This got me back into the studio every day. I would create my drawing for the day, leaving me with some leftover paint, Which forced me to create these random line drawings. Seeing the Keith Haring show with his unapologetic experimentation of materials, I need to experiment with line, color, texture, and composition. One night in October, I messaged my friend Cole Case, whom I look up to as a fellow artist and mentor, to look at these paintings. I didn’t know where I was going with these paintings or how to continue. He has helped me in giving insight and advice before in my work. Telling me to let go before I add more things to a painting (which I tend to do a lot, wanting to cover up everything with my abundance of lines and color). He said something that just broke me from all the insecurities I had been feeling for months. “Then let go and move on – because you can always come back.” I have been stuck in a big dump that I forgot to let go of (in my artwork and my life.) This was the push I needed in my studio practice to get back that euphoric feeling I had when creating. I created a good amount of paintings after that night. It’s always great to look around your environment for inspiration and research. But you have to remember it’s okay to let go of control and to remember to have fun and experiment. You always have time to go back.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I have my life goals and my creative goals as an artist. My life goals consist of getting my Master’s in Fine Arts at UCLA, I want to teach at the university level, have my art business, and have gallery shows as an established artist in the art world. Currently, moving on to this new year, I’m still in my creative journey. I want to sketch more, be in the studio more, post more on my social media, and build a new body of work. Even though my life goals seem far away, I still remember that I’m on my journey to self-discovery and appreciate those little goals in my creative journey. Being an artist takes work and time, but as long as I have a pen and a sketchbook on hand, I know that I’m on my way there.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://1b1c.weebly.com/
• Instagram: @1b.1c

Image Credits
Photos taken by Rebeca Sanchez Montero aka 1B1C