Cloistered away in her home studio in Lakewood Ranch, with paint-speckled wooden floors and natural light from the big squarish window overlooking the lush greens of the neighboring Robinson Preserve, Victoria Gomez Mayol revels in a newfound freedom. From the family home and street galleries of Argentina to the boulevards of Sarasota—complete with a pit stop in Little Rock, AR, and (narrowly avoided) pitfall in New York City—her artist’s path has proved a long and winding one, but she’s finally arrived exactly where she needs to be, painting what she wants, when she wants. Even the faint traces of pigment padded in from the studio and onto the white carpet of the adjoining living room can’t bother her now.
PHOTO BY WYATT KOSTYGAN.
Growing up in Argentina, the daughter of a notary and a calligrapher, Mayol discovered early the push-and-pull tension between needing to create and simply needing to eat. The family was creative—her sister sang, her brother wrote—but economics superseded arts and her father’s brush made local signage, not portraits. And while her sister still sings, her brother swapped pens and now makes a living as a notary, like his mother. Mayol didn’t paint until she was 14 years old, when she visited her aunt in the Argentinian countryside, stumbling across a room full of oil paints and not emerging until the sun had set and her first painting was complete.
PHOTO BY WYATT KOSTYGAN.
Painting lessons with her mother followed, with the older Mayol taking the younger to an after-school class for adults, exposing the self-taught sketcher to advanced techniques and the world of art beyond pure representation, where life experience and expression enter the mix and recreation becomes art. “It’s building an image from ideas,” says Mayol. “That’s the difference.” What followed was a period of artistic freedom and unfettered creation for the young artist, inspired by friends, family and coming of age amidst the vivid world of the famous Argentinian wilds of the Misiones province. Without an agent or a gallery, she found success in street festivals and freewheeling happenstance. But greater rewards beckoned, and she packed up for the US, landing in Little Rock.
PHOTO BY WYATT KOSTYGAN.
At first, the Land of Opportunity seemed as advertised. Mayol quickly found representation in two galleries in Little Rock and, with a bit of travel and entrepreneurial spirit, caught the eye of New York City’s Praxis Gallery, a gallery started by a fellow Argentine and dedicated to celebrating Latin American artists. But auspicious beginnings belied a coming drought and a trap about to be sprung—her work failed to resonate with the Arkansan milieu and Praxis began to look more like a gilded cage, offering little in the way of exhibition yet demanding sole rights to show Mayol’s work anywhere in the country. Mayol and her young family fled to Sarasota. Again, she found representation quickly in a local gallery; again, the experience proved stifling. At an artistic low, Mayol was no longer exploring and expressing herself, so much as cranking out canvases that satisfied market demands.
PHOTO BY WYATT KOSTYGAN.
“I was not painting,” she says. “I needed a change.” And this time the change wouldn’t be geographical. Cutting the ties that bind, she left the gallery and reentered her studio, taking a year to replenish and reengage with the artist she discovered all those years ago in Argentina. With no pressure to sell, to satisfy any audience—or even to produce—it would be a year of self-creation. The work would follow. “This is art, not product,” Mayol says. “I needed to go deep and do something real.” Easier said than done.
Alone in her studio, without the clutter and clatter of commissions and gallery demands forcing her mind and hand this way and that, rushing from one project to the next like an automaton approximating artistic expression, Mayol faced the vast stillness of the soul, digging deep to the painful bedrock of an artist adrift. She missed her home in Argentina. She missed her family there, the people who laughed the way she knew
how to laugh. She uncovered dark holes with deep-buried hurts and memories. “And the melancholy started,” she says. But this time she didn’t turn away.
“I was so lost at first,” she says, not knowing who the real Mayol was. The one who painted solely from nature, as she had for years? Or the one who specialized in figures and scenes, as she had also embraced? The painter who embraced the vivid noise of a busy canvas, or the daughter of a calligrapher who learned the power of silence while studying Eastern art? She stopped painting Florida birds and beach scenes, letting images of her childhood flow through her and onto any of the many canvases arranged around her cramped studio. The Hill of Seven Colors in Northern Argentina. The great ombu trees spreading their umbrellalike canopy over the Misiones jungle. Her brother, reclining under those broad leaves and reading a book as colorful toucans roost overhead. Mayol is all these things. Expressionism and control. Light and dark. Silence and the great whooping cheer that rallies life to its sound.
Stepping into her studio today, Mayol turns on some jazz, some tango or música folklórica from the rural villages of Argentina—anything to help her out of her rational brain and into something more instinctive and intuitive. She paints without expectation, without demands external or internal. She doesn’t know if it will be her best work, she says, “but I’m allowing myself to do it.” The answer will come with time. “Painting is about questions, not answers,” she says. “Put them on the canvas and people will find different answers.”
