Say It Straight *

Original Oil Painting on canvas, 38.25 x 68.25 x 2 inches · Things I Meant to Say collection Bold script sweeps across a field of apple green in three declarative lines — the most direct work in the series. Each stroke carries orange, red, lavender, and pink at once, the colors mingling within a single gesture, so the letters seem to glow at their edges. Where other pieces fill the canvas with overlapping writing, here the message lays itself out plainly, line by line, like a note written to be read. Complementary colors set the surface humming, the warm script vibrating against the cool green. Sculptural, saturated, and nearly six feet wide, it makes a statement long before the eye tries to decipher it. Wired & ready to hang. About the collection Things I Meant to Say is a series of text-based paintings about the words we hold onto — the ones typed and deleted, rehearsed and never spoken, felt but never sent. Each canvas begins with a foundation of deep color concealed beneath a thick, sculptural top layer. Working quickly while the paint is still wet, Guererra writes into the surface with various tools, carving fluid script that reveals the color hidden below. The writing is genuine — rhythmic, urgent, unmistakably a hand at work — yet it resists translation. "We hardly write by hand anymore. Our thoughts arrive in typed bubbles on a screen — quick, uniform, and gone in a scroll. This is my way of holding onto what we're losing. What emerges is handwriting freed from legibility: loops and strokes that carry feeling without fixed meaning, offered to the viewer to interpret — the way we all fill in the blanks." — Teodora Guererra