Lines in every direction

Absence and Presence
watercolor, 2021

I have a thing for lines. Power lines in particular have always been interesting to me. I find myself following the cables with my eyes and studying how sun-stained or vandalized the poles are. I see rusty old staples popping out of the weathered wood and wonder what the discarded sign someone once posted used to say. Growing up in East San Jose, power lines and poles were always part of the landscape. From my perspective, it was nearly impossible to view the golden hills that were right beside us without a pole or a cable dissecting them. Sometimes they’d slice up the view of the sky, depending where you were standing.

I’m still relatively new to the practice of doing art full-time, and so far I’ve been exploring two seemingly distinct styles. One has been very dark and abstract, with sharp, radiating lines that probably take some influence from my study of graphic design. In those pieces, I often incorporate segments of the cosmos: the milky way, far off nebulae, or simple starry night skies – segments that provide texture and an interesting pattern, but that also (I hope) provoke a bit of contemplation and wonder. The other style is in sharp contrast to the first: bright watercolors depicting recognizable street views in my neighborhood, and even some more traditional landscapes taken from county parks outside the city limits. These paintings are straightforward and exist to celebrate some of the lesser-known areas of the South Bay.

This year, I want to explore merging those two styles. Though they’re very different, one overlapping visual characteristic of each has been the use of lines and geometric shapes. Sometimes they’re only implied by sidewalk curbs or pathways in a landscape, but they’re always there, taking you somewhere. There are probably countless ways to push my local landscapes (and perhaps other realist subjects I like to paint) into the abstract. I’ve decided to start by introducing the various graphical elements and/or glimpses of the universe into the local landscapes and street scenes I’ve come to enjoy painting. Hopefully these new paintings will highlight the geometry that exists in the natural world around us in some interesting ways.

Here’s a little peek over my shoulder as I finished up the lines in this painting, titled Absence and Presence.