About the Artist
Sergio Palacios is a Multidisciplinary Chicano Artist who goes by Floating Streams. His primary disciplines are drawing, painting and tattooing, but his process can often times include photography and digital design. Originally from Los Angeles, now residing in Azusa California, his tattoo work currently revolves around the preferences of his surrounding community, and ranges from Chicano Black and Grey, to American Traditional, to Color Realism and more. Ever evolving, his aim is to build upon the versatility his experience has given him and take his tattooing from a broad body of work to a more niche one, drawing from his favorite elements to build a signature theme and style of his own. "As of now, the 'Visual Destination' is still somewhat unclear. What I do know is I enjoy the surprise as much as the slow unfolding of the effort, the illuminating 'Ahha!' moment brought about after just enough pieces of physical labor, naive thought, brief planning, and faith have been put together."
Sergio picked up his first tattoo machine back in 2011 with a little push from his friends who encouraged him to start practicing on them. "I recognize the way I started is not the most conventional. Buying a cheap kit on Ebay from China with no experience or knowledge of how to do anything is not the safest either... But such is how I tossed myself at it, and such is the way some professional tattoo artists I drew inspiration from at the time had started too. Although I did not have a traditional apprenticeship, I still did my best to learn and absorb as much as I could from anywhere I could. There might not have been as much content as there is not, but there was definitely of it to move a young naive, aspiring artist forward. Amidst the criticism of such path taken, I cannot help but also find a sense of pride, pride in the accomplishments, pride in the errors. All learning lessons."
2011
Before tattooing, there was Drawing and Painting. Being very introverted in nature, much of his time as a kid was spent being creative. "I remember being nine and drawing made up Mortal Kombat characters, which I would cut out, turn into 'action figures' and bring to school to play with. I loved using my imagination to create these elaborate fighting scenarios." It was in high school where he first took the thought of Art as a potential future seriously, after taking drawing and painting classes and winning awards/recognitions in contests and exhibitions he took part in.
Eventually he decided to pursue higher education and become a full time student. Sergio started tattooing his second year of college. He would have full days of school and would tattoo late at night. Sleepless nights were the norm. After a few years of an unsustainable workload, accompanied by shoulder/back injury complications, and poor mental health, Sergio dropped out and went on a few year hiatus from both school and tattooing.
Throughout that time, he still managed to create when he could, mostly for self healing, doing self portraiture photography, abstract expressionist painting, and much sketching. His work throughout that time has dealt with the duality of light and darkness in both a literal and metaphorical way, and explored spirituality, death, and the self in relation to such topics. Floating Streams in short, stands for, floating streams of consciousness, and comes from time spent in abstraction of thought and serves as a reminder to flow through the changing currents of life and the self.
2017
Floating Streams began tattooing fulltime in 2019 and has never really stopped creating Art on the side. "For many years, my art making has been very selfish, exclusively for me. But I do want to come back and engage in a more intentional conversation with an audience, an audience who has been there all long, simply waiting for me to connect to it." He hopes to finish his schooling one day and further develop his Art practice and professionalism. In the mean time, he'll continue taking life one day at a time and improving himself in all his crafts and aims. When he is not creating, he enjoys sleeping, stillness, spending time with his family and partner, and contemplating existence.
