What's your primary medium?
My primary medium, whoo, man, this is gonna sound really weird. I like aerosol cans. Because the vibrancy of the color is easier to control because I do a lot of masking tape. So every layer of color that is on my current works, or the bigger works, is two to three cans of paint. There's something that's, I guess it's more like a meditation when I do my work. So that, and it smells kind of sweet.
How did you get into doing art?
This is gonna sound really corny, but when I was in fourth grade, I drew a perfect circle by freehand. I didn't understand the concept of drawing at that time because I just saw like Calvin and Hobbes, that was kind of my upbringing, and then comic books. I said, you know what, let's start with the basics. I drew a circle. And then that circle is always in my work. I started to emulate drawing comic books, like Marvel Comics. I had a couple friends in junior high, we had our own quirky little group, and one of those friends of mine, Jose, was able to look at an artist's style in a comic book and imitate it. I was just like, how the hell do you do that? You know, now later I can see how you do that, you just have to have an eye for it. But I just started art from a young age. My parents basically let me paint on the walls in my room. A giant Sonic the Hedgehog, you know, or make t-shirts, creating my own characters that were emulating Bill Watterson illustrations. So I created a couple different little characters from that and that's where I guess my genesis for art started.
Where do you get your inspiration from?
Oh man, that's so hard. Mostly I just follow a couple artists on Instagram. I'm gonna hack a name here, Olafur Eliasson. He's from I guess, Sweden maybe? And James Turrell. He's got the crater over in Flagstaff and I guess Kanye West has donated like $30 million to his work to continue creating. But I like any artist that is willing to create, I guess optical effect or just in minimal ways. So any artist that is minimal, creating these optical effects are the ones that I'm always attracted to. Dwaine Carver was like one of my inspirations in school. I mean, I took his class and I was just like, this is the hardest thing I've ever had to do. I did one class at the graduate level and it was three hours of non-stop note taking, non-stop. But I just, I appreciate the fact that he had so much knowledge, and I had really no background in architecture. But at that point, and through my buddy Lupe, I found that with architecture you can actually have a conversation with art, buildings, things like music, and everything else. They can all communicate with each other. I would just like for Dwaine to give a discussion on the grant process, if he would ever do that, it'd be awesome. I mean, through Karen Bubb, I got a lot of information there, but someone who's actually practicing who has their hands on multiple things. You know, how does one do that? Because as artists, I think we're already doing that in our heads, but we just need to figure out how to make that tangible.
What keeps you motivated to create art?
That's called the burden of life, you know? My best friend Lupe is an artist, so we always have these dialogues back and forth. I have another friend who's now in Texas, Jesus Gonzalez who's a photographer, and so the three of us would always communicate. I found a mirror to that because one of my great-great-great-uncles was in a group in Mexico, called Los Tres Grandes, so, Siqueiros, Rivera, and my great-great-great-uncle is Orozco. And so, I've always felt like I need to continue on that lineage of artistry that he created back then but for today.
Does your heritage play into your art?
It definitely has found a way to get back into my artwork. In undergrad at Boise State University, I had a minor in Mesoamerican studies and I consumed so much knowledge. I had no idea about my own heritage except for the stereotypical things that I was watching, like lowrider culture, some of the movies that my dad would watch while I grew up like Westerns, of course, but yeah.
How would you describe what you create?,
I think you'd probably just call it hybridization. I've had this word in my mind since college called “liminality”, it's the state of being betwixt and between two worlds. And so what I'm trying to do, as I scale up my artwork, is create a place where people will look at work, but they won't really feel like they're part of it, but displaced by looking at it and that's where the optical effects come into play because I'm trying to get them to engage with it and at the same time for it to disengage them in a way.
Why is art important to you?
I think that art defines time. From like the beginning, the Caves of Lascaux, right? And then from what I was talking about with my heritage, the muralists of Mexico. And then you got Banksy, right? He's making all these works right now that are social commentary. I think art defines the time, and right now, there's gonna be whole new sets of artists that are coming out of this Coronavirus, and this inequality that's happening, or that has been happening before Coronavirus, and you know, Banksy's talking about that a lot too. But we define time, and it's very important that we never lose our voice. In America, we don't get enough funding, but in the rest of the world, they get plenty of funding. Maybe we'll get there shortly, I don't know.
Has the Coronavirus inspired you to create anything yet?
No, not really. Ironically, I look back to the old paintings and I see precursors to what could be visual... I guess quotes to what's going on right now. So I don't know. I don't think linearly. That's my biggest, I don't wanna say it's an issue, it's just how I function. I don't think in terms of linearity, but I can always come back to something again. So Coronavirus may not be something that's in my work right now, maybe I've seen it in the works of the past, or maybe it'll just pop up later. It's all intuitive for me. I like the subconscious to have a little bit more play in this than the conscious part in making decisions in art.
Do you think that having a space to create in is important for an artist?
Oh, definitely. We all know about the rents and the amount of money it costs to even have a home in Boise anymore. So as an artist, you know, even where I work, I can barely meet the median to get my own place. I was fortunate enough to find this place in such a short period of time, and that he's willing to let me do my work, regardless if he's even seen it or not. Yeah, I think having a space or even a community space is ideal. I mean, I know down in Garden City there's tons of little spots that a lot of artists are renting, they’re just converted RV garages I guess, but yeah it's important.
Could you tell me about the artist group you’re a part of?
I've always been a part of some group or another. Some Latino groups in town. So like Bobby Gaytan, he was one of the kids that I went to school with in the beginning and so I got to see his development. Lupe Galvan, who's a landscape artist, a portrait artist, he went to New York Academy. A lot of us had these little small network groups where we were trying to do things where we worked with, say, the Cultural Center out in Nampa, or we would do some altars for the history museum down in downtown Boise, and eventually we all just had to go our own ways because you know, we all have families and paths in life, and then eventually I became part of Los Dos. It was me and Pablo, who was basically kind of like the quiet partner. He's an older gentleman who spent time in the wars, Desert Storm, so we kind of influenced each other through dialogue back in undergrad school, and then we just decided hey, let's just try to make something happen. Bobby had Blackbook Gallery, that was probably like 11 years ago. So we would meet there as a small little group, and then that disbanded. Now it's Kyle who's trying to make something happen again, but then the Coronavirus did this so…
Boise is a small place, the art community seems fairly intertwined.
Yeah. It's kind of weird though because, we'll just say that the Latino art community is a smaller group, right? We're kind of here, and then, I don't want to create dichotomies, but everybody else, are this other circle of artists. Boise, for me, seems more like illustrator/illustrative and then painting, right? And then as you look at graffiti, then you get this interconnecting now of the small Latino group, it's just good to have diversity in Boise finally. I'm still trying to find, I guess, normalcy with the demographic of Boise, right, like I'm still trying to adjust to what it is to be a person from Boise, or from Idaho that's a Boisean. For me, my background was like my dad was a military guy. He was very much traditional Mexican. So all my background was like that, and then I went to college with all the liberal stuff going on there. So there’s this conflict of ideas and I haven't been able to sit down and say, okay, who are you? You're in Boise, you’re a Mexican, right? But you know, you're a stand out in Boise. So what do you do about that? I don't know. It's like one of those dialogues I've been having in my head for a long time.
Are there opportunities you've been afforded by being in Boise you might not have had elsewhere?
So hard man cause, you know, I haven't really done much networking and that's the other part of being a father and working full time is I don't have time to do the networking and find out where I would fit in. Staying in Idaho, I have to just fit in but I've put myself out to galleries in LA and said please give me a little feedback. I've had some good feedback there but I can't afford to go to LA and set up there. Then with my friend in Arizona, my aesthetic probably would fit better there than it would here, but at the same time, there are some changes going on with laws that may incorporate my artwork to kind of be present here when the time comes.
Have you ever been able to support yourself with art?
No, I've never tried. It's so hard to just take a leap of faith and say, I can do it. Whereas I have the comfort of, you know, 401k, health care, all this other stuff. I thought about it to the effect that when my kid is on his own, would I be willing to take a risk and do that? At the point of trying to support myself, I think it's more like creating a business, maybe selling designs, doing some t-shirts or something like that. That's something I've talked about with other artists. There are those that already do it, you know? It's just getting out of the matrix. You kinda have these moral conversations with yourself.
Do you think art conveys a message?
Yeah, you know, I see art like poetry. I really didn't get into poetry until I took a hybrid class in grad school. It was a Lit and Art class, they sandwich together. So I didn't really understand how words and art worked together or influenced each other. I see poetics in objects, I see poetics in work, and that's where I really respect minimal works where they speak so much more with so little. That's not what I do, obviously, but specifically to my work. I'm not really making a comment on social things going on right now. I'm just trying to create a space to maybe get lost in, to be distracted by work versus being influenced by it, by some social conversation, right? I mean if someone finds something within the work that they identify with related to politics, you know, or whatever, that's them. That's the beauty of art.
Have I missed asking anything about your art?
I think that it's just trying to create a voice in art in Boise that would welcome people into Latin culture, right. And so, I'm visually trying to do that, with the colors, right? Colors, everybody loves colors, and people love design. So those are the two things that I would like to focus on in my works. Regardless of if they can identify with the cultural aspects too, it's not really that important. The important part is that when they look at the work, they see that there is an experience to be had. There's this whole 20th century, end of the 20th century idea that you have eight seconds with art, right? And then it's gone. Whereas I'm trying to find a way to encourage people to spend time with the work again, to be lost in the work. And that's why I'm trying to scale up so they can be lost. And that's where that whole liminality thing comes in. It's like let's get them lost. Why not? That's where meditation can happen, and where it begins, when you look at art. There was a female artist who came in from New York, she had everybody meditate. And the work, I don't know, for me didn't seem to relate to the act of meditation, but it meant that she had the audience, right? At that moment, she had the audience do something together as a group. I'm just trying to find ways to negotiate how to get the viewer back into the art. Growing up, I didn't really identify with my own culture as much. I mean, I grew up in Florida. I had Puerto Ricans, Cubans and African Americans. Coming to Idaho, I was, you know, thrown into the LDS community and I was like, what is this about? So it wasn't until I got to college and I went past the surface reading. I went down to the cultural aspect of reading and I wanted to know the nuts and bolts of what our culture is, and why certain things are the way they are. Like, you know, the version of Guadalupe, where the hell did that come from? I get symbolism, I get metaphor, but where the hell did that come from? And then I found out. I was like, oh shit, it was the church, so the church created this ok, let's say mythology, where this guy I can't remember his name it's like Diego or something was walking around in the valley on these mountains, right and so past cultures like the Aztec culture had always worshipped a mound because there was a God that would be atop that mound. They have thousands of like gods, right, so when the Catholic Church wanted to convert everybody to Christianity, they started learning about the mythology of that culture, and they found ways to implant their religion into the culture and so they created the myth of this woman figure, the feminine figure, right. There was already a different figure before that and a different name, but it just so happened with that figure they were able to consolidate power through an image. And it's crazy how that works for cultures and religions.
Is there anything else you'd like to touch on?
No, I think that for the most part, I'm pretty much like a soft spoken background kind of guy when it comes to art, you know, I've always wanted to be that forward person. Like with these groups that I join, they'll kind of say “your work needs to stand out more to the forefront instead of the background”, but I'm always like, no, my work is gonna stand out regardless if it's in the foreground or background. So I'm always trying to mediate and be a diplomat. For me, it's I don't, I don't feel comfortable being the forefront of things. Things like having dialogue and talking about art, I get scared when I have to talk to people who are art up here at that conceptual level of thought, because for me, I think differently. It's like, for example, when I read Nietzsche for the first time, I had to read it for four years before I could almost understand it because I was so trapped in my own thoughts. So that's just the nature of who I am. Like, I'm not ready to respond immediately if it's something I'm not comfortable with at that point because I guess I care too much about what other people think. Maybe if I was one of those people who said, I don't care what you think, then I would just say something.