By Gwynedd Stuart – LAMag.com – Photo: Courtesy Shizu Saldamando and Hotel Figueroa In East L.A.
Shizu Saldamando spent the better part of a decade painting the people she parties with. Lately she’s taken a different tack, more carefully curating her subjects instead of chronicling the punks and club kids who’ve drifted in and out of her life. The change in creative direction coincided with the biggest change of them all: she became a mom. Even if she’d wanted to keep partying till 2 a.m. and photographing subjects to paint, that wasn’t really feasible once her son came along.