I Didn’t Even Know the Word ‘Drawing'

Filmmaker Emilia Anderson reflects on her interview with the painter Virginia Castillo, whose work finds intimacy, identity, and beauty in the textures of everyday Caribbean life. La versión en Español de este artículo se puede encontrar en el substack de Mia Anderson.

Watch the short film here.

Virginia Castillo and the Art of Everyday Life in the Caribbean

By Emilia (Mia) Anderson

In a city and a country known above all for its dangers, Honduran painter Virginia Castillo chooses to see her surroundings through a lens of inspiration rather than focusing on precarity. I had the opportunity to interview the artist on the cozy back terrace of her home, in the Toronjal neighborhood of the city of La Ceiba, which is also my hometown in the North Coast of Honduras. The interview was part of my research for a short documentary film I directed, commissioned by the Waves of Art Gallery in Roatán and the Municipality of La Ceiba. Like proper ceibeñas, Virginia and I communicated in a mix of Spanish and coastal English, and the result was an unforgettable account of life, art, and beauty in our corner of the world.

Artwork by Virginia Castillo

I began by asking her how she finds inspiration, and Virginia turned to a recent anecdote from her everyday life: “They told me, ‘they’re gonna rob you! [on the bus],’ but I got on anyway. The bus drove through a place called El Búfalo, I think; and what did I see? The daily life of normal human beings: women washing clothes, women buying green bananas, […] chickens. We passed the old hospital and about fifteen well-dressed young girls from nursing school got on. They got off one by one in their stops. No one seemed terribly concerned about getting robbed.”

The daughter of a Ceibeño father and an immigrant mother with Jamaican and Caymanian roots, Virginia’s cultural identity (or “Virgie,” as her English-speaking loved ones call her) is shaped by this distinctly Caribbean crossing that is so characteristic, yet so rarely talked about in our region. Her paintings depict domestic scenes, bodies at rest, minimal gestures, and spaces that do not seek to stand out, but that hold an intimacy deeply recognizable to those of us who grew up in the Caribbean.

Artwork by Virginia Castillo

She spent her earliest years between La Ceiba and Roatán and recounts to me how she spent her twenties on the tiny island of Santa Helena, which served as a landing port for all kinds of seafaring personalities. “It’s incredible how people arrived from all over the world. I’m not even talking about ships—people showed up on anything that could float.”

Artwork by Virginia Castillo

“I have nothing against academic art, but sometimes I see paintings [by Hondurans] inspired by a street in Paris. Why? Honduras has so much to offer to all kinds of art. All you have to do is absorb the daily life of an average Honduran to get inspired.”

Virgie not only avoided art school, but also holds no formal academic degree of any kind. Her learning has been intuitive, persistent, and deeply tied to observing her surroundings. In a context where validation often comes from external institutions, her trajectory challenges traditional ideas of training, legitimacy, and artistic success. “I passed second grade … barely!” she says, laughing. 

Despite her lack of conventional education, Virginia is an exception to the norm that opportunities to pursue art professionally are scarce in the Honduran Caribbean. “I don’t know why, but I was always drawing even though I didn’t even know the word ‘drawing’; we called it ‘printing.’” 

Beyond her artistic talent, she has also been an example of entrepreneurship, being one of the few artists in the region who genuinely makes a living as a painter. However, she explains that her success is not without complexity, since her buyers are almost exclusively foreign tourists or relatively wealthy individuals. Her pieces sell at high prices, something she herself acknowledges as paradoxical.

This structural contradiction repeats itself again and again in the history of the Caribbean economy, where local culture becomes a tourist attraction or, in the case of painting, an export commodity that rarely circulates within the very community that inspires it.

Beyond staying optimistic Virgie insists: “I know there is crime in Honduras […] I’ve had to live it […] but that doesn’t mean I’m going to close my eyes and my mind […] to the beauty I see around me.” Through the Caribbean language of her work, I feel that Virginia has helped us understand that in order to survive the inevitable melodrama of everyday life, it may not be necessary to escape reality, but rather, within that reality, to choose what and how we see what is already there.

About the writer and filmmaker

Emilia Anderson is a writer and filmmaker from La Ceiba Honduras. With a degree in fiction film directing from EICTV, Cuba and a background in film studies, her work focuses on telling unknown but inspiring stories of contemporary Honduras.