Disrupt My Realism!

Please...

I’ve been a fan of cubism and other forms of disrupted realism since I first saw Picasso’s Guernica in my Aunt Kathy’s living room when I was about eight years old. I had no idea what it was about, but I remember being fascinated by the ghost-like head flowing into the room, the shrieking horse, and the screaming mother holding her dead infant. It didn’t look anything like what I had been taught was “good” art, but I loved it!

Guernica, Pablo Picasso

Since I started painting myself, I’ve never had any desire to paint things realistically. I have a camera for that. I want to paint things the way I feel about them rather than the way I actually look at them.

I use bright colors in place of skin tones, I mix features from different cultures in the same face, I fracture lines and exaggerate features, and I do it all for good reason: I never want a viewer to pigeonhole my people by culture, race, gender, or whatever. I want every person who stands in front of one of my paintings to find a little something in it that is like them, or someone they know; something they can connect to.

You may remember these little guys (I made about a hundred of them one winter):

Or this one:

The more I paint, the stronger is my desire to push that concept of disruption further away from the abstracted reality that I practice now. I just don’t know completely how to accomplish it just yet. I experiment and play and learn as I go, but sometimes you need someone to show you a path. I found one of those someones last week. And it was SO much fun!

In September, I went to an exhibition of Latin American artists, “Place of Encounters/Lugar de Encuentros” at the Cameron Art Museum here in Wilmington, NC with two friends. It was colorful and poignant, joyful and political, and sometimes downright heartbreaking. Such beautiful, emotional work.

One artist in particular stood out to me because his work reminded me very much of some of the cubist artists I have come to enjoy. I spent the most time that day taking in his work. So, when I recently happened across an announcement that Nico Amortegui was going to teach a workshop there, I jumped at the chance to learn from him. You can see his amazing work here and here.

by Nico Amortegui 2022, from his website

About a dozen of us painted under Nico’s direction for the better part of a day filled with joy and laughter and came away with really fantastic work. Though we all painted with the same color palette of interior latex house paints, each artist’s work had their own hand in their finished painting. It is rare that I attend a workshop and leave with a finished product that I am happy with: usually, I focus on learning a new technique without regard to making a “good” painting, but this time was the exception. I learned some strong lessons about how to move along this path to abstraction by creating interesting layers and using simple lines and shapes. I also got a glimpse into how Nico made decisions about what to keep and what to obliterate. Fascinating.

At the end of the day, I even came away with a painting that I love! It makes me happy to look at it each day as I work in my studio.

I hope it makes you happy too. Thanks for reading along and hanging out with me here!