Posts by Angel Ayala

In Baja, Mexico, in the late afternoon, everything goes this beautiful shade of gold. The sky, the doors, the surfboards, the plants. Every color takes on a hazy, warm richness I’ve never seen anywhere else in the world. I’ve been going to Baja for years and always been drawn to it intuitively. But it wasn’t…

Have you ever walked into a room full of artists and immediately felt like the worst one there? Like everyone else got the memo and somehow you missed it? In this post I share a story from one of my early workshops at Esalen on the Big Sur coast, a woman who threw down her…

For years I controlled every mark I made in my paintings. My hand. My intention. Every decision accounted for. Then I picked up a trowel and everything changed. In this post I share what a trowel does that a brush never can, what I learned from painter Gerhard Richter about chance and why it matters,…

When I first started making art I drove to Santa Fe to see what I thought would be the best art in the country. Gallery after gallery on Canyon Road. All of it technically flawless. And the longer I looked at it the smaller I felt. Then almost by accident I wandered into a museum…

We were taught that an art practice is something you build alone. Just you, your brushes, and the work. But after years of watching artists struggle in isolation and then transform inside a community, I no longer believe that’s true. In this post, I share the seven reasons why making art in community works, not…

The artist’s journey is harder than anyone tells you. It’s a rollercoaster of highs and lows, breakthroughs and setbacks, and most people quit right in the middle of a dip, not knowing that the smoother path was just ahead. In this post, I share what the creative journey actually looks like, why so many artists…