For most, dreams tend to fade pretty quickly after waking up. If you try to remember exact details, they often fade even faster.
Not the case for Mercedes Llanos, who graduated in 2015 with a bachelor’s in fine arts from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Her dreams remain with her so clearly, she uses them in her paintings.
“I always have very vivid dreams and sometimes very lucid dreams. I just wake up and I remember when I was dreaming,” she said. “Other times I go through the day and I start remembering as things happen to me.
“So I try to connect, ‘What is this waking life, this reality? How is it connecting to my dream life?'”
Now living in New York, Llanos recently was awarded a grant from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation for $12,000, money given to developing artists around the world to help pay for supplies and routine bills while expanding their artistic vision.
Until now, Llanos has supported her artwork by painting murals for various companies and teaching art classes. The grant money allows her to drop those jobs, which has led to an important step in her career.
“I have been given the opportunity to exhibit my paintings in two different galleries—Lyles and King in New York and Balice Hertling in Paris. The shows will be on view in the summer.”
Christian Vogel, associate professor in painting and drawing in the UTC Department of Art and described by Llanos as a major influence on the development of her art, said Llanos’ success is not a shock.
“Mercedes demonstrated a strong vision and exceptional work ethic. It is no surprise to me to see her excel in the professional field, and I am excited to follow her career.
“The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation award is a significant and competitive international grant, and I am thrilled that she has been recognized with this support at this emerging stage of her career.”
Born in Argentina, Llanos moved to Chattanooga when she was 13 and her stepfather was hired by Volkswagen. Until then, she had grown up in her home country’s patriarchal culture, which always seemed odd to her.
“The man is the one who makes the rules. I experienced that in my family. My mom is a housewife, taking care of the children. Seeing my stepdad go to work and pay for everything, that seemed a little bit off to me,” said Llanos, one of the artists who worked on the mural that now covers the sides of the AT&T building on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Chattanooga.
“From a young age, I noticed that it was kind of a given that the females were to stand by. We’re like objects of desire and meant to look pretty, and that’s it. So I had a different point of view that made me very active, and what I wanted was to get away from that.”
Her artwork focuses mainly on impressionistic images of her dreams, usually focusing on human figures and their relationship—both emotionally and proximity—to each other. They represent not only her dreams but her personal feelings and experiences, she said.
“It’s a psychological experience of the self and then the world around me,” Llanos said. “These dreams that I have, most of them involve me being with another being, fighting or engaging in some form. There’s this push and pull between figures.
“There’s always this fight, and I am in a lot of them because they’re my own issues that I’m working with.”
While her art is intensely personal, Llanos wants viewers to take away emotions of their own.
“What I want is the viewer, universally, to be drawn to it. Like it or hate it. Doesn’t matter. But if it catches your attention, makes you look more, I think that’s important for me. I want to wake up feelings of pleasure and pain and love and hate and the polarities of emotions.
“I also think a lot about, politically speaking, the issues of sexuality and gender identity and the growth of sexes. So it’s more directed toward women, but I think it can reach everyone.”
Over the last 18 months, she has expanded the size of her artwork to canvases as large as 8×10 feet. The sizes express the same emotional and philosophical feelings, she explained, but she hopes they are more powerful.
“It has to do with the work to be imposing and impossible to overlook,” she said. “I would go even bigger, but my studio size does not allow it.”