The Art Without a Face

Daisy Velasco’s art explores culture through missing features. Photo courtesy of Daisy Velasco.

As the ending credits of “Arthur” on PBS Kids played on the television screen, young Daisy Velasco began her art journey through a five-minute tutorial on how to draw the characters on the show.

From there, she moved on to more intricate projects. Velasco, 25, is a first-generation Chicana and 2022 Cal State Long Beach Fine Arts alumna.

The painter encapsulates the mundane and bittersweet aspects of her infancy as an adult through bright colors. The characters in her paintings have no faces, a pattern she started around her final year at CSULB. Velasco said the concept developed from her routine of hang-drying clothes outside on a clothesline.

“I imagined [the clothes] becoming real with any movement such as wind blowing or when my younger cousins would run through the lines of clothes,” Velasco said.

CSULB alumna Dede Lucía met Velasco in an advanced color theory class, but their friendship developed after working next to her in the art studio.

“I think her work speaks to many kinds of people—the unseen, the underappreciated, the unacknowledged, the unmerited,” Lucía said.

Her former art professor at CSULB, Daniel Dove, believed in her potential from the beginning.

“There are a lot of young artists who are very interested in exploring their cultural and ethnic identity as part of the content of their work,” Dove said.“But it's interesting to be someone who paints the figure but then, in a way, erases the identity in the painting.”

Over the years, Velasco’s themes have shifted from focusing on mental health issues stemming from oppressive traditional Latinx experiences to the mundane yet blatant color palettes of gender roles, tradition and domestic violence. The emphasis on clothes and bodiless characters has remained constant.

“I think that surrealist art can go off the rails pretty quickly when the artist feels like their only job is to just blow your mind with how weird they can be,” Dove said. “If they don't understand it at all, they feel alienated and they walk off. But if they feel like there's something to connect with and then something elusive, that's when they stay in front of the painting.”

Velasco’s work became more personal once she began exploring it as a way to take her power back from witnessing domestic violence in her childhood home. The burnout from her class workload during her final year at CSULB made her tap into that vulnerability.

“It was always in my head and it’s a lot for a child to take in,” Velasco said. “I thought ‘Why not paint this? If it's haunting me, then I might as well paint it and see what happens.’”

Today, she shares an art studio space in TLALOC Studios in Los Angeles with 14 other like-minded creatives like herself. She frequently paints and shares her pieces while balancing a part-time job working with children and preteens.

“It's just like a nice feeling just being surrounded by so many talented artists,” Velasco said. “It's a community that's formed between people who are different with the same interests and goals in mind and that's always super cool to have.”

Velasco has since had the opportunity to showcase her art at art exhibitions across California including her current showcasing at The Muzeo Museum and Cultural Center in Anaheim. She even had the opportunity to showcase her art during an international exhibition in Berlin, Germany.

“As an emerging artist, she is carving away at an old, white male-dominated industry—which is a formidable challenge,” says Lucía.“But specifically, it serves countless young artists of the future by example.”