Domingo Herrera likes to do a little bit of everything. Born and raised in South Toledo, the local artist has loved creating artwork since he was a kid, participating in summer art programs when he was as young as eight years old.
Mingo created art until he was about 17 or 18, but then stopped for a while due to personal matters. “Everytime anyone said something about it, I didn’t want to do it,” said Domingo. “I had a fear of being made fun of. I forgot how much I liked doing it, and depression and anxiety runs in my family. So as I got older, I started to veer away from it.”
Back to work
Now 34 years old, Domingo is back to pursuing his passion, starting two years ago, after a 15 plus year hiatus. “I tried for a long time to be happy,” said Domingo. “Two years ago I think it was a real click for me to want to be happier and normal. If I want to be happy, I have to at least try.”
Since then, Domingo’s work has begun to be noticed. He won Best Visual Artist in the City Paper’s 2019 Best of Toledo Awards. He says art has given him an outlet to feel young, peaceful, and free again. “When I started to get a lot of compliments on my art work, I started selling a few pieces to make a living,” Domingo said. “It’s scary but it’s everything to me. You never know until you try.”
As an artist, Domingo has experimented with several different mediums — he says it feels like he has tried it all. At the moment, his focus is abstract and modern art. “I’ll use a piece of just about anything to create art,” said Domingo. “If my dog tore one of my kids’ toys, I would save it to create art.”
At first, Domingo was creating his art pieces in one to two days and 5-7 art pieces a week. These pieces were smaller and more in the mold of mixed media. However, now that Domingo’s pieces have gotten larger and more detailed, it takes him about a week to create one art piece.
“I get my ideas on Sunday and then by Friday, I post the making of the piece and how far the piece is along in the process,” he said.
Largely leaving his pieces untitled until recently, Domingo started naming his artwork within the past six months. The titles are simple and direct: “Voyage.” “Golden.” “Night Owl.” He also documents how he creates his artwork on social media for others to see and always posts his final products. “Now that I do art, I like to document it a lot,” he says. “That way when I am older, I can say I accomplished a lot. I can say that I was positive and did so much.”
Patrons are able to purchase Domingo’s artwork by reaching out to him on Facebook through “Art By Mingo”.
