We were first introduced to Cuban-American artist and designer Arlene Delgado through our House of Somos residency competition last year, where she came in as a close runner-up with Surfing Shiva, a meditation painted onto a 22-year-old surfboard. The competition has long since wrapped, but her work has stayed with us ever since.

Arlene creates in the space between order and surrender. Across her canvases, geometric forms give way to serpentine lines, control dissolves into texture, and opposites don't resolve so much as they learn to coexist. Her work is less about communicating one singular idea and more about shifting the way someone feels while spending time with a piece. Each piece serves as visual reminder, as Arlene puts it, to ride the wave of life instead of fighting it. We recently sat down with her to talk about her practice, the tension between control and intuition, and the quiet forces that shape her work.

In the beginning, a big part of my process was trying to reconcile two opposing impulses inside myself. The part that wanted fluidity, intuition, abstraction and the part that craved structure, order, definition. The moment where those two energies met created a strange sense of balance for me.
 

A lot of the early symbols reflected that tension. Geometric forms, mirrored compositions, triangular structures balancing against each other almost like hourglasses. I became interested in duality, polarity, perception of time, "reality" versus waves of consciousness. Even the patterns carried that idea. Straight checkered grids interrupted by warped or fluid ones.
 

Then with Prima Materia, I felt myself moving away from order entirely and surrendering more fully to abstraction. That body of work felt less like constructing an image and more like creating an energetic imprint or emotional residue on canvas. I stopped trying to control the meaning so much.
 

More recently, I've found myself returning to symbolism again, but in a more intuitive and embodied way. Serpentine forms, central focal points, eye-like shapes, pathways. They feel ancient and psychological at the same time. I'm less interested in symbolism as something fixed or literal and more interested in how certain forms seem to carry an emotional charge across cultures, dreams, memory, mythology.
 

And materially, texture has always been the through line. Earth pigments, raw canvas, layered surfaces, chalky washes, visible imperfections. I want the work to feel tactile and human. Like something discovered rather than manufactured.

SURFING SHIVA, THE PIECE YOU ENTERED INTO OUR HOUSE OF SOMOS RESIDENCY COMPETITION, WAS PAINTED ONTO A 22-YEAR OLD SURFBOARD AND DRAWS DIRECTLY FROM RAM DASS'S BE HERE NOW. CAN YOU WALK US THROUGH YOUR PROCESS IN CREATING A 'FUNCTIONAL MEDITAION' PIECE? HOW DID SURFING SHIVA COME TO LIFE? 

I loved the idea of using an old surfboard because it already carried such a strong energetic history. It’s an object tied to movement, surrender, rhythm, and nature. The board itself had dents, wear, sun damage. It felt like it had stories embedded in it before I ever touched it, and I
wanted to honor that.
 

The title Surfing Shiva came from thinking about transformation not as something graceful or romantic, but as something messy, cyclical, and necessary. Shiva represents destruction and rebirth, not for the sake of chaos, but the kind that clears space for something new to emerge.
 

Surfing became a metaphor for consciousness, and honestly for being alive in general. None of us move through life in a perfectly steady line. Sometimes you’re in flow and sometimes you’re getting dragged across the ocean floor a little. The question I keep coming back to is how we
navigate the uncertainty of it all. Ram Dass used to talk about doing life either like it’s a big weight on you, or as part of the dance. There’s magic in learning how to stay present through all of it.

I’m interested in creating objects and images that don’t just communicate an idea, but actually shift the way someone feels, focuses, or perceives while spending time with them. When I designed the piece, I wanted it to function similarly on a visual level. The central eye motif acts almost like a focal point for meditation, while the surrounding lines and serpent-like forms were designed to feel rhythmic and slightly hypnotic. Something your gaze could slowly move through rather than instantly consume.
 

I wanted the board to hold that same invitation. To feel contemplative without becoming overly serious. Something symbolic, but still playful and alive. Almost like a visual reminder to loosen up a little and ride the wave instead of fighting it. Something I’m still actively practicing myself.
 Easier painted than practiced sometimes.

We all walk around inside fairly fixed ideas of who we are, what we do, how we think. Mine are particularly stubborn. In some ways that identification is necessary for daily life and continuity. But it can also become limiting. Constricting.
 

To me, entering an altered state is really about loosening that grip for a moment. It's accessing a softer, more open kind of awareness where perception becomes more fluid and unexpected associations can emerge. A space where you can think, feel, and create beyond the usual
version of yourself.
 

I think those states are actually available to us all the time through different doorways. Meditation, breathwork, music, movement, conversation, ritual, even sharing a glass of mezcal with people you love. And of course, psychedelics are another path too, but they’re not the only
path.
 

Physically, it changes the way I paint too. I become less rigid and less precious with the work. I stop trying to force an outcome and start responding more intuitively to texture, movement, rhythm, and repetition. The paintings usually become more layered, gestural, and alive when I'm working from that state because I'm reacting less from analysis and more from sensation. For me, those moments of getting out of the way and touching something more honest are essential to my creative process and to my relationship to life itself.

Follow Arlene on Instagram.

Photos by Megan McCluer.

Hilma af Klint is probably the artist I return to most often. I'm deeply inspired by the way she treated painting as something spiritual and intuitive rather than purely aesthetic. Her work feels transmitted more than manufactured, and that's what moves me. She was actually part of a
small secret society called The Five, a group of women artists who held séances and practiced automatic drawing as a way of channeling messages from what they called the High Masters. Painting as devotion. Painting as transmission. I love that.
 

I'm also really drawn to symbolism, mysticism, philosophy, dream states, and the idea that images and archetypes can communicate something language sometimes can't fully explain. I'm interested in art that feels charged without needing to explain itself too literally. 

A lot of my inspiration also comes from visual atmosphere and sensory detail. Sight is my dominant sense and where most of my inspiration enters, so travel tends to affect me deeply. New textures, colors, architecture, light, strange little details. Chipped paint on a wall, faded signage, the way incense smoke moves through a room, the color palette of an old hotel lobby, the tension between something ancient and modern sitting next to each other. 

The atmosphere creates a feeling, and sometimes the feeling becomes the reference before any image does. I love things that sit somewhere between the sacred and the everyday.