Kiki Valdes "Mon" oil on canvas 2008
Heading East (oil on wood panel 2008)
This is where alot of my thinking happens.
Kiki Valdes "Ise" Oil on canvas 2008
Outside of TC509/13/2008 2:52:00 PMSo many things come to mind when you think of the beginning of September. For one my mom’s birthday is in early September, can’t forget that because I’m such a good son; right mom? Also it’s the anniversary of 911 so it’s a mixture of things that play out in our minds at the beginning of the Virgo month. This early September my brother Humby and I were in for a big treat. We got to travel to San Francisco and show off our new startup in the DemoPit at TechCrunch50. This is all very new to me and same thing goes for the city of San Francisco. We live in Miami, where you basically live in a flat humid pancake with palm trees and bad drivers. So San Fran was just so different. As I write this I have an awful sore throat. The weather over there was so nice that when I came back here the weather difference took a toll on me. It could have been that or just the fact we did 400 Demo’s in 2 days! It was all worth it because anyone that was there will tell you that TC50 was amazing!
The Process
9/11/2008 8:43:00 PMFor the past year I have been working on a series of about 60 paintings focusing on new ways of creating space and a sense of landscape within abstraction and figurative 
abstraction. I have been drawn strongly to Frank Stella this past year and his collages and sculptures and how he's always in search of greater space within objects and where it goes beyond the canvas. It challenges the confines and limitations of what a painting use to be. These kinds of ideas have been very stuck in my mind in the recent months. But, I am very interested in searching these ideas but within painting. I edit my paintings with an addictive urge, I paint over areas repeatedly. I figured if I wanted to create a sense of space instead of editing my work with paint, I would cover up what I painted with raw canvas...and basically start over again, yet cutting areas of the raw canvas so the underneath painting is always exposed. For me its a way of calming the chaos and showing the past.