III. Transformation
Observations from five years of participation in the Visual Artists Association (VAA)
This Research Essay #330 documents the observations from five years of participation in the Visual Artists Association (VAA) artist development programmes and how that participation influenced my artistic and professional practice.
I joined the VAA in 2021 with the intention of validating my work within an international context.
Over time, I realised that the most significant change was not the opportunities themselves, but the way I began making decisions about my practice.
Ongoing participation in mentoring sessions, portfolio reviews, professional development programmes, and exchanges with other artists allowed me to observe a process I had not anticipated:
the gradual development of criteria for evaluating my work, selecting opportunities, and integrating previous professional experience into my artistic practice.
This essay documents that process.
I arrived in Peru at the end of 2019 looking for an alternative to Venezuela's economic crisis.
My goal was clear: to become a full-time professional artist.
Six months later, the pandemic brought economic activity to a standstill, eliminating any realistic possibility of building a career.
Back then, my priority was not making art but supporting my family, who had remained in Venezuela.
My practice suffered, but it continued.
Towards the end of 2020, I entered an international art competition in Italy. Out of two thousand submissions, my work made the cut.
When I received the notification, I caught COVID. I failed to respond before the deadline and lost the opportunity to take part.
I needed a more sustained relationship with an international professional environment. That was the moment when I discovered the VAA.
I still remember missing my first meeting because of the time difference. While it was 10:00 am in London, it was 03:00 am in Lima.
Despite that beginning, I decided to remain involved. I found useful information and people willing to share their knowledge.
Over the following years, I participated in mentoring sessions, portfolio reviews, professional development programmes, and conversations with other artists from different contexts.
Those activities evolved from isolated events and became a permanent space for reflection and critical review within my practice.
This essay highlights the main observations throughout that period.
When I joined the VAA, I equated professional development with access to opportunities.
I believed that building an artistic career depended on applying to more open calls, exhibiting in new contexts, expanding the professional network, and gaining international recognition.
My question was straightforward:
How can I access better opportunities?
Looking back, I realised that this question was insufficient.
Opportunities may well open doors, but they did not explain how an artistic practice becomes capable of sustaining itself and evolving.
Nor did they answer the questions that invariably proved far more important:
• Why does a collector become interested in a particular work?
• Why does an architect decide to incorporate your work into a project?
• What transforms an artistic practice into a proposition that creates value for others?
The VAA offered me something I had never had before: a continuous environment in which to examine my practice.
Over time, I moved away from pursuing opportunities. I began using them to examine my decisions.
Each session required me to explain why I had produced a particular work.
• How did I present it?
• What did I expect it to achieve?
That process also led me to integrate knowledge that I had previously kept separate from my artistic practice.
My background in science, marketing, administration, and business development gradually became a useful framework for organising, communicating, and evaluating my practice.
Over time, reflection shifted from an occasional activity to an integral part of my daily routine.
Before this experience, I would have designed my portfolio to explain my work, show my achievements, and present my CV. It was centred on what I wanted to communicate as an artist.
Today, I design it from a different starting point: the value that my practice can create for different audiences.
• Before
What do I want to communicate?
• Today
What does a collector, an architect, or an organisation need to understand to recognise the value of this practice?
My initial concern was gaining access to opportunities.
The very same opportunity could produce completely different outcomes depending on the quality of the criteria.
Mentoring sessions required me to justify decisions, identify inconsistencies, and better understand the purpose of my work.
Having a mentor who consistently questioned my reasoning exposed assumptions I rarely challenged on my own.
I remember one mentoring session. I was explaining my plans to bring my work to Europe when KVHS interrupted me with a simple question: "Why aren't you thinking about bringing it to the Emirates?" I paused. I realised my understanding of the international market was much narrower than I believed.
Before joining the VAA, I associated artistic development almost exclusively with making art all day long.
I can no longer sustain that assumption.
• To interact with other artists.
• To review my portfolio.
• To write about my practice.
• To present my work to strangers.
• To reflect on the objectives of my practice.
These activities transformed the way I worked both inside and outside the studio.
The artwork remained at the centre of my practice, but the studio is no longer the only dimension where it evolves.
Participating in review processes gradually shifted my decisions away from intuition alone.
I started asking different questions about my work.
• Why this piece?
• Why now?
• What problems am I trying to solve?
• What creates tension?
Rather than producing immediate answers, this process strengthened the criteria for evaluating possibilities and discarding others.
Before joining the VAA, I treated my professional background and artistic practice as two separate identities. Engineering, marketing, and business development belonged to one world; making art belonged to another.
The mentoring process challenged that separation. Rather than competing with my artistic practice, those experiences became useful ways of organising projects, communicating ideas, and making professional decisions.
What surprised me most was not that business knowledge proved useful. It was that both dimensions could coexist within the same artistic identity without reducing art to a commercial activity or turning business into an aesthetic exercise.
The integration strengthened both.
No single mentoring session transformed my practice.
No individual portfolio review produced an immediate breakthrough.
What proved significant was continuity.
The change did not emerge as a single event, but as the accumulation of many small, sustained moments.
I realised that the most valuable outcome of this experience was not a particular exhibition, open call, or professional opportunity.
Its greatest value lay in participating within a structure that incorporated review, dialogue, and reflection into my artistic practice.
Over five years of participation, I found that environment within the Visual Artists Association.
That development, however, depended on sustained and active participation.
This essay does not suggest that the same experience would produce identical results for every artist.
As I tried to understand why that participation produced changes extending beyond the artwork itself, new questions emerged.
• How are professional criteria developed?
• Why do some individuals transform a professional structure into a learning practice while others do not?
• What relationship exists between professional criteria, character formation, and evolution of artistic practice?
These questions extend beyond the scope of this essay.
They became the starting point for a broader investigation: Structured Audacity.
This Research Essay does not present that investigation. It documents the findings that made it necessary.
This essay is part of the Structured Audacity research archive.