This week Brighton Journal spoke to local artist and author, Miguel Amortegui. Miguel uses different media including painting, sculpture, film and photography to share stories with a social conscience. He also works as a Participatory Photography Facilitator, teaching photography and digital storytelling skills to those who have been victims of war, forced displacement and sexual abuse. Miguel told Brighton Journal that he teaches photography to give people “a voice and a therapy that enables them to see their story from a different perspective.” His photography book ‘Voices of the Jungle’ was created in response to his time teaching refugees at the Calais Jungle, and shares the stories of the people he met whilst working there. The book raised both awareness and funds for the refugees, and Miguel was invited to present his work at the United Nations General Assembly in 2019.

How St. Ann's Warehouse, the Brick and Brooklyn Children's Theater navigated a year that can only be described as pure absurdist tragedy

Later this month, Colombian artist Miguel Amortegui's Love in the Time of Corona will bring artwork to Old Dock Street and Water Street in Brooklyn with Amortegui's paintings.

Painting has helped me to overcome these skeletons, it has helped me to trap them in plain canvases and fill them in with colours.

This is where painting takes place. I vividly remember accompanying my mother as a child to deliver her art classes at the University of Bogota, Colombia. There I used to entertain myself with oils and pastels, spending hours trying to copy the work of famous artists that at the time were unknown to me.

The UK-based, Colombian artist Miguel Amortegui will enliven St. Ann’s archways and light boxes with his wildly colorful paintings in an exhibit called Love in the Time of Corona. Using vibrant colors and intense brush strokes, Miguel paints the humanity and hope of the marginalized and misunderstood, and, in his own words, “…the complexity of us humans and our lives — our feelings, passions, sadness, hopes, and traumas — filling each stroke with all the colors these feelings have to offer.”