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I paint worlds I would like to inhabit. With my paintings, I aim to engage viewers at an emotional level. At a fundamental level, I'm just a person with a paint brush, standing in front of a canvas asking it to lead me home.
It's relatively easy to engage with paint and canvas as I do now. But, for most of my life, I struggled with the creative blocks I carried around. All the social programming, past hurts, shoulds, and belief in my own limitations kept me locked in a rut for a while. Then, in early 2023, I became critically ill with Sepsis and had an NDE (near-death experience). That experience cleared some things up for me. I let the "blocks" go pretty much all at once. I also became much more creative, a common phenomenon with NDEers.
At first, I painted in a style (kind of pop-art-ish) similar to the images I saw whenever I closed my eyes while I was ill. There were thousands of them. I needed to get that experience out of my system.
Since then, I have moved on to creating the art I am more passionate about. The joy of making art that I love is something that I hope resonates with you. My favorite genres of art, namely Art Nouveau, Impressionism, and Pop Art, significantly influence my style.
Bluejay Zylaco (B.J.) grew up near Flint, Michigan. Their parents loved the arts and, at an early age, exposed their kids to visual art through museum visits. Both kids developed an interest in art as a result.
Zylaco was a creative child born into a family of seamstresses. Their first creative effort was designing and sewing puppets on a sewing machine. Later, they discovered a knack for realistic drawing and shading in a middle school art class. By high school, Zylaco took up painting in oil and acrylic.
After high school, Zylaco joined the Army, serving two terms, where they worked as an air traffic controller (ATC) and, later, an ATC instructor at the US Army Aviation Center. After their Army experience, Zylaco got an ATC job working in the control tower at Columbus Municipal Airport in Columbus, Indiana. Then they married, and spent much of their adult life raising a child with severe disabilities.
More recently, they worked as a freelance front-end web designer, SEO (search engine optimization) researcher, and analyst. After surviving a critical illness and near-death experience in early 2023, B.J. decided to close their freelance business to devote themself full-time to painting and art-making.
