The paintings of Mariajuanita Guzman

How the work changed

Oils came first, and she called them her first love. They are a hard thing to travel with. Oil paint needs solvents to thin it and to clean up after it, the sort of flammable bottles airlines refuse and small towns do not stock, and it dries slowly enough that a finished canvas cannot be packed on the morning you leave.

Her own catalogue shows the rest. She was still painting in oil in August 2016, more than a year into the road. The first acrylic appears that September, and she went back to oil twice in October before letting it go. From November there is nothing but acrylic, which dries in an afternoon and needs only water.

Two problems no medium solved. A finished painting has to be photographed or scanned properly before anyone else can see it, and finding somewhere to do that, in whatever country they were in that month, was its own hunt.

Then the painting itself had to go somewhere. They could not carry canvases for years and had no home in the United States to send them to, so her work went to whichever relative could take it. That was the part that worried her. A painting in the post can be crushed or lost, and once it arrived she had no way of knowing how it was being kept.

A tablet answered all of it, and she did not like it. Cherry is the first digital piece she made, and for the better part of a year it was the only one. She went back to paint and stayed there. She picked the tablet up again in August 2017 and barely put it down after that. By 2018 there is nothing else.

She chose neither change. Oils went because they could not travel, and paint went because a file cannot be crushed in the post. She was good after both.