"If I was doing this somewhere else, it would be less urgent ..."

Our friend Diego Rodriguez-Warner was born in Managua, Nicaragua in 1986. In 2008, he studied under the Cuban Minister for Fine Arts, Lesbia Vent Dumois, in Havana, and later graduated from Hampshire College and the Rhode Island School of Design. Here he reflects on making art.

Diego Rodriguez-Warner from TheArtTrade on Vimeo.

[In Cuba] they really take you seriously as a social contributor ... the work is like really meticulous messes ..that's what we have in this country ... we have an apparatus to keep us separated from each other, to keep us fighting each other, to keep us not certain what's going on. We take in these things because they are presented to us every day...

The goal of art is to learn. Every painting that I finish seems to get closer and I've been saying that for years ...

And he's just getting started. You can find more of Diego's work here. The web format makes the prints the easiest to take in.

Somebody thought this interview needed that awful music behind it -- it didn't. Enjoy anyway.