NFAND Episode 59 – Manny Vega, painter, illustrator, printmaker, muralist, mosaicist

Talk about real. Manny Vega is super real. Legit all the way. All the way.

Praise the Lord.

Before recording our conversation Manny showed me this spectacular book he’s been working on for 4-years. It’s a fantastical sight of black ink drawings over brown paper. The light blue leather bound of the book, a little less than a meter in size, has about 80 pages, each one a drawn world filled with life flushed in nuance and inspired by the act of surrendering.

As he tells it, to surrender is to trust in your angels, your madrina, the Gods, and the ancestors. Each second of creative action is trust in surrendering. Not surrendering as meek, but surrendering to the most high in silence and pure expression of sincere enthusiasm.

Manny is enthusiastic for the action of creating in the moment - one drawing is an 8-hour stretch. Here and there is a state of being.

He let me take one picture from the book and it turned out to be the chameleon. Fancy that. Look at him in the branch, knowing the right hue will appear at just the right time. Good dust spreads wherever the art finally arrives to rest.

Manny's heart is in his art. Surrender.