Meet Carlos Franco

We recently connected with Carlos Franco and have shared our conversation below.

Carlos, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

During my time at Miami Dade Community College, I was able to have an incredible teacher and close group of friends. We were all filled with a deep hunger to exhibit and our teacher helped us find spaces to slowly show our work and express ourselves in our paintings.

Once the two years were done, we all graduated from community college at the same time and applied to schools all over the country. I selected to stay home and attend the University of Miami. During this period, it was more of a solitary experience, being a more typical university, the painting program was very small, I talked with graduate students more but interactions were minimal since most painted during the day. With school and work, my painting time was concentrated to the night, my final semester sleeping at the studio as I pulled all-nighters trying to make the most of my time there.

Many of my friends went to art schools, where social groups were heavily arts based. In comparison to my solitary experience, I took my experience as a way to reinforce my focus knowing once school ended because I would have to make time and space to continue painting. Since moving away from Miami, I have been blessed to have a small room as a studio and try to take advantage of it for all my artistic pursuits. My resilience comes for all those late nights at UM, just painting like a mad man.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

A little bit of background, I was born in Nicaragua in 1987, during the end of the civil war many families were making their way to other countries. My father and I made our way to Miami, FL where my mother was waiting for us. Grew up with extended family, in a heavily immigrant city, shaping who I am today. I completed my Bachelors in Painting at the University of Miami.

In 2013, I moved to Uruguay, a radical change for my life, and since I spent the first few years tirelessly working on my paintings. I exhibited across the country and had my final Solo exhibit at Lowe Mills Arts & Entertainment in 2021. This was personally one of my best series I had done to this day.

In 2021, I started exploring other interests. I worked with a group of friends, creating the collective “Colectivo Marron”, we worked on translating essays from English to Spanish and designed a format for A3 pages for zine making. We did about 4-5 translations together from Audre Lorde to Grada Kilomba. Outside of the collective, I found enjoyment in translations and have worked on over a dozen essays.

I’ve also been thinking of exploring photography through the project “NO ZOOM” in which I photograph Uruguay, the small town I live in and its surroundings. This has also been a learning experience since in the past I only took reference pictures for my paintings. I’ve been thinking of expanding my focus with photography into short films, planning and thinking of ideas for the coming year.

Finally, it’s only been in the past month that I’ve made a shift back to painting. In the past, a lot of my focus was the environment around me. Those were the things that interested me at the time, especially trying to understand the country I moved to, wholly different from anything I knew. But after taking time, I think this coming series is going to be more introspective and personal in subject matter. I’ve only just started but am formulating what this series could look like.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I’ve been thinking about how to explain this, I think this is the simplest way to explain.

1)Curiosity to always explore
2)Determination keep going when things get hard
3)Everything you do is for you

One of the biggest lessons from my hiatus in painting is that stepping away sometimes is necessary. During those years of intense painting, I burned out several times and got sick for days at a time. I was in a place where I couldn’t paint anymore but having a creative life means to always keep exploring, to open oneself to possibilities. During that time I focused on printmaking, on translations, and now exploring photography and film. All these things nurture other aspects of my creativity and always inform my thoughts on painting. As I’ve returned to paintings, I am taking everything I’ve learned about art and myself into this next series and work moving forward.

To live a creative life is to go at your own pace and follow a path unexplored for you, no one can answer the question you put forward. Guidances can come from friends and mentors but ultimately, we, as artists, are the ones making the work.

Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?

Friends, honestly my biggest help in overcoming challenges. Reaching out to my friends, other artists, we talk about art and everything in between, talk about difficulties we experience in our own works and hear their thoughts, sometimes just stepping away and disconnecting from it all. To connect to others who understand this struggle is really the best way to recharge.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cfranco_ruiz/
• Other: https://medium.com/@happyfolk87

  https://www.instagram.com/pinol_press/