We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Tania Pomales. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Tania below.

Tania, appreciate you joining us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

My earliest memories of drawing and creating were when the big, thick Bell Atlantic phonebooks still existed. If you know what they are, you know they were quite substantial tomes of endless numbers and advertisements.

I was born in 1989 to Puerto Rican parents living in the United States. My mom was a travel agent, computer chip maker, and ceramist turned stay-at-home mom for most of my childhood, and she helped my dad, a glass tooler, run his scientific glass business from her home office. Their marriage wasn’t always the most healthy environment for me to grow within, though. My dad was a fierce workaholic and my mom had what I now understand to be undiagnosed ADHD and post-partum depression after she had me. The mix of these two personalities and mental states often felt like a constantly raging storm for little me to witness, and I instinctively turned to creativity first as a self-soothing mechanism and later as a way to communicate what words couldn’t convey for me. In some intrinsic way I also understood that I had a knack for this in a way that I didn’t have for other things, and so a pencil or a paintbrush felt very much like a natural extension and expression of self. It felt normal, understandable, and like “home.”

Mom’s office was in a cozy little room with a really big, comfy couch that sat in front of her desk, and I would often make blanket forts that stretched from the front of her desk held by pencil holders and heavy books that then tucked into the cushions of the sofa across the way. In my little sanctuary, I drew in my first sketchbooks- those thick Bell Atlantic phone books. Sometimes she would give me the crisp, clean computer paper she had tucked away in her office closet… but there was something about the phone book and the texture of the paper, the words, the weird patterns that made drawing in them a lot more magical to my curious little mind.

I was a very hyper kid. I ran around outside, ran up and down the stairs, ran through the hallway and back again like I was some kind of superhero trying to fly off out into the world. I loved videogames, I loved Pokemon, I loved reading, I had a crazy fascination with Egyptian history and the afterlife, and I loved escaping into my imagination every chance I could get. In every regard, I am still the same today, I’ve just leveled up to Adult.

My mom never really had a problem with me being such a ball of energy, but when she really needed me to calm down, she’d plop me in front of the tv to watch the magic of Bob Ross. It was this fascination with the alchemy I was witnessing on his canvases and the worlds I made for safety and comfort that started a fire in me around the age of around 6 or 7.

Then, I think what really pushed me more in that direction was a trip to the store with my mom where I found and fixated upon a small, bright turquoise book on a table. It was a Golden Guide book on Fishes. I don’t know what it was about it, but I NEEDED it and begged her to buy it for me. We weren’t even back to the car yet when I was already flipping through each page carefully dissecting the beautiful illustrations of so many different kinds of fish. I took that book everywhere. It was like a bible to me… like some secret tome of ancient knowledge that I had to crack. The way the illustrations looked like photos and yet like painted pieces was fascinating. I’d find myself asking, “How did they do that!?” while I put the book ever closer to my eyes to the point it would end up touching my nose. One day, sitting outside in the shade under a beautiful cedar tree we had in the yard, it hit me in a more clear way: people can get PAID to make art, and making art is something I can do as a “grown-up.” Someone enjoyed this work enough to illustrate an entire book, and if illustrator James Gordon Irving could illustrate a whole book about fishes, then I could be a professional artist, too. I still have that book. It is taped up and in tatters, but it sits on my desk as a reminder that magic and direction can be found anywhere if you are adventurous and curious enough to follow your creative whispers.

So my journey to that decisive moment was as much trauma-filled as it was driven by curiosity. I also think it is important for me to add that while my childhood left me with a lot of shadows that still haunt me today, the older I have gotten, the more I understood that my parents were just doing the best they could with what they had at the time. My mom passed away in 2018, but my dad is still with me. I’ve really had time to reflect on how art has been with me the whole way. My art often tells on me in this way, where I unknowingly balance the pain of what was and what happened with the compassion of what is and what can be built if I just allow myself and my environment some grace. We could all use some grace these days.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I was a kid, around 6 or 7 years old when I decided that I was going to pursue art as a career. I know that I was making art from about 3 years old because my mom kept everything I ever made in a huge folder that I found a few years ago. That particular drawing was an eagle, and while it was crude, it really did look like a bird. She would always document the age I was when I made the art, the title I gave it, and whatever I used to make it. Both of my parents were really supportive of me making art and never tried to dissuade me from that. For that, I thank them every day. What they did ask was that I try to pair that choice with something that could either elevate that path or at least serve as a way to put food on the table later on in my life. So, I picked business studies, and I took several accounting, marketing, and business administration courses in college for my minor. I majored in fine art with a concentration in painting, and I received my BFA from Stockton College in 2012.

I work mainly with oils to create paintings that delve into dark, surreal themes with a style that juxtaposes vibrant color palettes against somber, sorrowful motifs. My inspirations range from my bold and colorful heritage and cultural roots to videogames, nature, tattoo work, anatomical medical books, Taoism, Buddhism, tarot, mysticism and religions, and so more. I love to create visually enchanting pieces that explore the complexities of life, death, and the cyclical nature of the human experience. Additionally, I love to explore themes of self-reflection, deep introspection, and personal growth within my pieces. However, I don’t just stay strictly within the realm of oils. I really enjoy traditional pencil drawing and watercolors as well as acrylics. It’s just that oils have a special place in my heart for feeling so magical to me when I use them.

I also do pet portraits and memorial portraits as a way to honor both the living and the departed, and I take this aspect of my work extremely seriously. When working on memorial portraits, be it of a dear pet or a loved one, I always ask that the energy of whoever I am painting enter the space and guide my brush. For me, it is a deeply sacred conversation amongst me, the painting, and that soul that I am trying to honor to the best of my ability in the piece.

What I am most proud of about the work I make is my ability to take subjects that make people feel scared, such as skulls, and depict them in a way that is less frightening and more full of life. Viewers often tell me that upon seeing my work and the way I presented such a startling subject matter, they feel “unafraid about it.” Suddenly, what was once a terrifying reminder of their mortality became a message about aiming to live life fully, to let go of the past, and to conquer any and all fears in order to build a better tomorrow. I think this comes from a need in my childhood to make the world around me seem more safe and less threatening, so I learned to see that there is beauty in nearly all things if we just take the time to see them with compassion and a healthy curiosity. I want to share that feeling with the world through my art… that moment when you feel like all the tightness in your chest can dissolve as you breathe knowing that you’ve learned to live with a little less in fear. Instead, you find that you can live a little more boldly, more softly, more openly.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Unlearning the idea that my self-worth is indicated by my art and sales is something that took me many years to accomplish, and at times I still struggle with it. It is so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that making sales and gathering likes on social media is the barometer of your value as a person and an artist. This is simply not true. My job as a creative is to make the work I am called to make and to put it out into the world to share it. What happens next after I share the work is entirely out of my control because I cannot control the audience. I can only hope that they resonate with what I have lovingly created. If they do, then that is wonderful. If they don’t, that is still wonderful because my self-worth isn’t tied to it. The power in this perspective is that I am free to create whatever I want because I’ve allowed for the mental and emotional space to do that.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

The Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu is a fundamentally life changing book for me. It’s small; 81 verses… and written thousands of years ago. Yet, each verse holds a lifetime of treasures that I keep finding and going back to. The Tao teaches that life is best lived in accordance with nature itself. Nature runs perfectly on its own time. It rushes nothing and puts seemingly no effort into doing anything at all, and yet everything in nature gets done. The trees grow, the leaves fall, the flowers bloom, the birds chirp, the hearts beat… all on their own. We need not meddle, but rather we should observe the way the leaves fall from the trees so that we can learn that there is a time for holding on and time for letting go. When I applied this way of viewing the world to my art and my artistic practice, a whole realm of flow state and grace opened up to me. I didn’t have to force ideas to come out of me because I learned that I have an abundance of subjects to choose from if I just look within and also look at nature itself. And it didn’t stop at just my art. The Tao became a sort of grounding framework for the rest of my life, too. I learned to understand that there is time for everything and that I don’t have to constantly grind and kill myself to get it all done. I am allowed to be like the cat stretched out in the sunbeam on the floor. In fact, I need that to make better art. I have become a much more compassionate person, too.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.taniapomalesart.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/taniapomalesfineart/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TaniaPomalesArt
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYrfFZM_cDfFWnuIzX7Lkrg

Image Credits

Headshot by Ruben Garcia

All other photos by Tania Pomales