Erica Daborn 'Hecho en Mexico'

A collection of paintings made during a sabbatical year from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, eight months of which was spent in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico 

          We all enjoy stories. From mythology to the movies on a Saturday night. They are the way we all connect to the bigger picture; the way we experiment with a response to challenging events. Through stories we experience the exotic, the traumatic, the unfamiliar, all from the safety of a parent's lap, a comfy sofa, or the anonymity of a darkened theatre.

          But unlike fairy stories or moral tales, myths or movies, the stories in these paintings have no beginning or end. They show only fragments of the human drama, neither disclosing what has preceded the moment they capture, nor indicating what will follow.  Some appear to be accidental encounters, others family dramas, still others homely sagas poised precariously between Mother Goose and the Twilight Zone. Each image emerges out of an intuitive drawing process. I wait for interesting characters to enter the frame; then I follow their cues. Many are erased, discarded; the most persuasive remain.