In this newsletter:

• Color Sensing

• First BMC Mail Drop of the year!

• Things I've been enjoying lately

Buiti/Buenas!

Happy New Year!! I want to start the year talking about color 🎨

Before I started doing illustration, I lost access to my creative brain for 4 years due to my chronic illnesses, including one that has the same symptoms as a brain tumor. As I started to get my creativity back after some treatment, illustration- something I had done throughout my life for fun and as gifts for people close to me- started coming forward as the best and most accessible way for me to develop a new relationship with my creativity.

For decades, I’ve wanted to explore my relationship with color more deeply. I've always loved color; living in New Orleans, I was constantly lit up by the Caribbean colors of the houses around me. I've always been taken with how the green shade of palm trees becomes vibrant when a blue-gray storm cloud is behind it. Moved by the way pinks and golds and purples can flash so quickly across the sky when the sun is setting.

But I'd never really developed a close artistic relationship with it. Before I got sick(er), I was a sign painter which meant I was usually working within a set color palette chosen by a business. My creative focus was also funneled into music for a long time. I hadn't really had a chance to explore color deeper than mostly observation.

What I'd learned all those years in observation, though, was that there was a sensory experience of color- like smell or taste or touch- that I really wanted to develop. When I looked around at things, I could see the colors as they were, but there were more colors hiding under the surface that would peek out at me. I just couldn’t grasp them. But I wanted to, I wanted to wipe away a little bit of the top layer and uncover what was there. And I wanted other people to see it too.

When I moved to Puerto Rico, that sense heightened so much, and it took me a while to process that. In my first year here, a huge amount of my energy was focused on slowly settling into my home, physically recovering from the move, and adjusting to living by myself for the first time being as chronically ill as I am. It took SO much physical, cognitive, and creative energy.

In 2025, I spent much less energy on those things, and I could finally start focusing on exploring this heightened sense. After I first visited Puerto Rico when I was 19, I knew I needed to live here. There is a feeling of wholeness and home that I only experience here, a connection to my ancestors who loved this land. Developing this color sense here feels important; I think this is the only place I could really unearth it, the only place that could provide me the well and the resonance I need in order to do it.

Making this #artVartist image of some of my favorite pieces I made in 2025 helped me see how much of that sense I developed. Not just being inspired by the colors around me- there are so many beautiful colors and textures across the mountains and in the colors of the buildings- but starting to articulate the colors I’m sensing in the environment around me. Not taking colors I like and applying them to the landscape, the flora, the fauna, but looking at the landscape and asking myself,

What color do I see beyond the various shades of green?

What colors are these mountains showing me?

What colors do I see underneath the red of this flower?

What color is this water, actually?

What other colors are there, peeking out from underneath the top layer?

The thing I’m probably looking forward to the most this year is growing this sense and practice even more. Color and illustration have become my way of sharing my favorite place with the world.

I love to hear about how other people experience the world through their senses, either of our known senses or other (for example, I am an auditory-tactile synesthete! And I love the exchanges I have with people and learning about others' synesthesias when I talk publicly about it). In my 2026 theme of connecting, I would love to hear if you have something similar to my color sense or a synesthesia or anything else that lets you experience the world in your own way. You’re welcome to hit reply on this email or comment on the web version and share with me!

Borikén Mail Club

First Season Mail Drop!

Here are the postcards for the first season this year. March’s postcard- the first oracle deck mini print!- is blurred and will be announced March 1st.

If you’d like to get January’s postcard, be sure to join by the 31st! All BMC art is mailed quarterly, so these will go out at the end of March.

➕➕ Members Only??! ➕➕

Normally if you’re a Borikén Mail Club member, you’d see extra images and a video below! But I’m still working out some kinks in the transition.

What I did have planned for this space will be included in a BMC only email on the 15th! And in its place, here’s a short- under 2 minute- video from December that is available for everyone, member or not, to watch if you need a couple minutes to decompress 🖤

If you’re not a member and want more videos like this as well as the Mail Drop, you can join here!

And just an FYI, the last Ko-fi mail of 2025 went out on December 30, so it’s headed your way! Keep an eye on your mailbox 📬

Things I’ve Been Enjoying

I came across this incredible virtual art exhibition made by disabled artists called Slow AI. I often go on #NoAI rants, and I will continue to do that with my full chest. The current landscape of generative AI as a billion consent violations in a trench coat, as I like to say, is irredeemable to me. But I love "cripping” things (viewing, changing, creating things through a disability lens), and this is such a perfect example of cripping AI.

There are 7 installations. Here is part of the description:

We co–created a community of disabled makers, hackers, artists, musicians, writers, and teachers from 7 different countries who "critiqued, altered, and reinvented" the algorithm…

We thought through AI slowly. We slowed by using techniques like cellular automata dating back to the 1950s—the era that named AI—alongside deep learning and generative AI methods from the 2010s and 20s. We slowed by using open source models that ran locally on own machines instead of in far off data centers. We slowed by authoring algorithms from our own writings, paintings, and even medical data.

Our work was a communal act of deceleration. We weeded out expectations of speed, slowing ourselves and our algorithms down to the irregular, limping pace where conversation, collaboration, and crip culture thrive. Each project, marked by a stone, carries this core into its own medium, culture, and timezone.

Also, while I’m not religious, I have long been fascinated by Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych, and I really enjoyed this 2 part in-depth video essay on it!

“Despite the strictness of his Catholic faith, it’s clear that Bosch- like all great artists- did not limit himself to only one world. He existed in a state of liminality, able to envision the highest ideal and the lowest depravity, able to elevate our vices and make a mockery of the sacrosanct. He was able to survey the entire range of human experience and represent it with honesty, depth, and humor, such that 500 years later it feels alive with meaning.”

Lirén | Calendars — TORO

Keep track of the year with the Lirén Any Year Wall Calendar and a new tropical fruit from Puerto Rico & Caribbean each month.