art by ANDY ESPINOZA
article by EDEN TIJERINA

lingerie by JANES VANITY
perfumes by CASWELL-MASSEY

In early October 2019, soft pastel artist Andy Espinoza and I packed our bags and prepared for the 14-hour flight from New York to Tokyo where we’d begin a month-long journey together dedicated to “creating beautiful things”.

I had been a fan of Andy’s work for years before he reached out through social media to ask me to pose for him: soft and true-to-life works of veiled, feminine purity. Art that had always held a sort of innocence each time I studied it.

Being an artist myself, I was not only there to pose, but to learn from him as we worked together on other personal projects for high-profile fashion designers like Marchesa, Anna Sui, and Guo Pei, who also seek out his work.

Andy and I would go on to collaborate together for a few more years, realizing both similar styles and concordant feelings regarding what we wanted to evoke when putting things out into the world. We both chased after captured glimpses of graceful, solemn beauty. He has a singular talent for painting women how they truly are, paying special attention to the smallest details and imperfections that make us unique. He uses those finely-observed elements to make his work come to life with stunning fervor.

During our month-long span through Tokyo, Kyoto, Seoul, Bukchon, Marseille, and Provence, we studied the photography of Pierre Bonnard, inspired by the beautiful female forms that he captured of his wife in paint, prints, drawings, and on film throughout the 1910s. I had brought along several film cameras and taught Andy the basics of analog capture so we could manifest delicate femininity through a variety of poses and movements in multiple mediums.

We first felt a connection to Bonnard in Asia as I frolicked under speckled sunlight, half-nude in an idyllic south Korean forest. Of course that connection’s intensity increased upon arriving in France, the gestational home of Bonnard’s drive to encapsulate the humanizing freedom inherent in relishing simple, transitory feminal beauty.

Narrowly avoiding jet lag in Japan, we rose very early to begin working in earnest. On a couple of occasions, Andy would excitedly come to my door at 5:30 am, and we would set off to catch the sun’s brilliant emergence that only briefly exists in those early moments of the day. This kind of light is ideal for Andy’s pastel works, so I begrudgingly agreed to roll out of bed and pose. If you look closely, you’ll clearly see a twinge of resigned late-sleeper aggravation in my eyes in the finished piece. Another testament to Andy’s ability to capture minor, sublime moments that most artists overlook or fail to freeze in time with their medium. (This piece is now one of my favorites.)

We were both exhausted and overwhelmed with the incredible beauty around us. Of course, there were many unglamorously long train rides, endlessly kind strangers, delicious meals, communication errors, and glorious once-in-a-lifetime accommodations. We bickered and created and walked around for miles, discussing how art had saved our lives in different ways and how lucky we both are to have any platform at all to connect with the world using things we make.

It was a captivating adventure, and we came away draped with a travel-wearied satisfaction that we accomplished what we had set out to: live out a small, marvelous dream, and create a few beautiful things.