One Thing Leads to Another

This painting always reminds me of the saying “one thing leads to another”. That holds true pretty much for the majority of my projects. I get hundreds of ideas a day, most of those ideas I’ll write down. Others, I won’t and only a small percentage of those ideas actually get completed (I did notice that the ideas that I do write down almost always end up becoming a completed project). This painting is called “Face to Face” and actually has a really cool story. It was an idea that I had back in 2019 and it’s kind of how I made my way to the new experimental portraits that I am creating currently. The portrait came about when I got the idea to move into portrait painting. Before that I had been painting anything and everything but had not yet chosen a focus. I have a BFA in photography and spent my time studying  photojournalism while I was in college. I looked at a lot of street photography and photo essays (a lot of true, raw, in the moment, unedited photography). This was my course load and after a while I got a little bit bored. I wanted something different and I was drawn to portraiture and studio photography. Working in the studio you get to make a photo the way you see it in your head or how you want to see it. You have 100% control over your images and subject matter. It was a nice change of pace for me and a big contrast from street photography or “Documentary Photography” because when you are taking photos in a documentary way, what you see is what you get. Also, you want to try to keep that image as true as possible. Now, it’s only going to be as true as what’s inside of the frame. That is the only context you have without an explanation. Whatever is happening in that little rectangle is what is true in that moment. All of that led me to my want to take portraits and eventually paint portraits.

I started by looking at work from photographers that I admired. The goal was to find images that I thought were lit amazing and had amazing composition. I was always looking for something unusual. I had gone to school with lots of amazing photographers so I decided to check out some friends that I studied with and see what they were working on. I stumbled on new work from one of my good friends Bianca Garcia. She is a fashion and music photographer and has a large portfolio of beautiful portraits. I looked through her portfolio and I saw this image of these two women with their faces transposed together. I thought “oh wow this would be really cool for me to paint”. Now, at this point in 2022 I would just grab that image from the internet and paint it without asking. However, I was just starting and Bianca is my friend and I thought “maybe I should ask her if I could paint this picture”. I thought “I don’t know if there are the terms or if she had a contract or something like that”. So, I asked her she said yeah. Great. So I went to paint this picture and just kind of went for it. I remember it was the first time I would be doing a portrait like this. I was really obsessed and gripped by it. I stayed up all night painting and I remember having no idea what I would call it. As I was posting it on Instagram at 6 AM, a song by Daft Punk popped up called “Face to Face”. This immediately resonated with me. I always like to explain how my artwork is a reflection of who I am and what I’m going through at the time. When I was making this painting I was at a crossroads of sorts. I was facing myself as as an artist and coming face to face with decisions of really defining what I want to do with my art. The original “Face to Face” painting was initially on dictionary paper and it was a diptych. It was two canvases put together it stood vertically but the horizon line connected both canvases. The dictionary paper was a kind of driving the point of defining oneself and so that was the inspiration behind the painting. I had a lot of fun making this painting and I got a lot of really good feedback. I got so much good feedback I thought “Wow!, Yeah!, Great!, Cool!, this art is about the sell immediately!” But no, it didn’t sell immediately. It actually took about three years to sell it. That was so interesting to me.

I can get impatient sometimes. At the time I thought “OK I got a lot of interest but it didn’t sell so it must not work”. So I moved away from these types of paintings and started to do other things. It wasn’t until my cousin hit me up and said “Hey, I really like this painting and would like you to do something like this for me and my boys”. I said “OK cool! this sounds like a cool project, let’s do it”. I got everything I needed from my cousin and created “The Three Canvas”. That ended up being another really good painting for me that really shined a light on my creativity and gave this style of portraiture some momentum. It was so interesting to see that it all started with the “Face to Face” canvas that moved into a custom commission and then that turned into more of a commercial sales channel for these types of portraits. I now I can take images given to me by each family, digitally assemble them together and create these really cool colorful portraits. 

So yes, one thing does lead to another and another and another. The thing that I find so inspirational about his phrase is that it’s so simple. If you have the courage and confidence to begin it will then lead you to where you ultimately want to be… eventually. 

-Von