From Dinos to Birds

I began working on the series in 2021, put the works aside, worked on them again a year later. In 2022, the final title From Dinos to Birds emerged. A year later, I felt the need to push it further and finally completed it. The four canvases are a visual story that works simultaneously as a narrative and as a sensorial visual and musical stimulation.

This series went through many editing. I printed versions of the works in progress, and drew over them with wax pastels. To recreate the luminosity of pastels on the canvas, fluorescent pink and green are raw or mixed in with other colors.


Cataclysm translates my vision of the extinction of Dinosaurs by a large meteorite.

Lizards evokes the closest beings to dinosaurs along with birds to survive by themselves and within more evolved creatures. The reptilian brain is the part of the human brain that regulates physical survival and bodily function. This painting calls to the very far past and the present and questions the boundaries between the ancestral lizards and the present lizards within. Is there a reason why in traditional religions the devil is shaped like a reptile?

Although the remains of much older hominids were later found, Lucy unearthed in the Somalian Hadar desert in 1974, was believed to be the new Eve. Taking an elective class in human evolution at Harvard in 2013, I remember holding a replica of Lucy's tiny skull. Rather than a ferocious and mighty predator, she was a frail being emerging in a colorful and dangerous world. Lucy is my middle name and it was the 70s.

The Wooly Mammoth coexisted with humans during the ice age and became extinct because of human hunting or climate change or both. The focus of this painting is the violent exchanges between humans and animals, and the predatory aspect of all creatures. While finishing the painting, on the lower left corner of the canvas, the shape of "Hello Kitty" emerged. Cats are cute predators, and next to the cat is a dinosaur's descendant, a bird.