Painting for My Life November 2006

by Bruno Aguirre
Photos by R. Byrne

At the age of 28 Bruno has already carved out a unique vision for art. He describes the stages of his journey thus far and the vision that drives him forward.

I grew up in Mexico with two ambitions for my life. I wanted to be a bullfighter and I wanted to be an artist. I finally chose the second of the two professions because in order to be a bullfighter you have to actually fight with bulls. I no longer even want to find out if I have that kind of courage.

The other problem with bullfighting was that I didn’t have anything to practice bullfighting with. It was easier to become an artist because access to crayons and paper was easier than finding young bulls. Or cows. Or whatever beginning bullfighters practice on.

I have no sense of being adrift in my life, or that I’m some kind of wanderer without clear direction. Art is something that I’ve been brought to. I’ve come to regard art as my destiny. My Maker in His wisdom bestowed upon me the brain, heart, and soul of an artist rather than a bullfighter, or a serial killer for that matter.

Finding My Way
Drawing was a passion with me from my earliest memories. My mom said I started drawing before I started talking. I could work away with my pencils for hours without growing bored. At age six, when most of my peers were working with coloring books and draw-by-number, I was forcing my brothers and cousins to remain in one pose long enough for me to create their portraits.

When I was in kindergarten I had an unforgettable experience that came to define my life and my art. Our teacher took us all for a walk around a little park near the school. After we got back to the classroom the teacher said to draw what we had seen during our walk.

Most of the fellow pupils drew such things as pictures of a flower or of a garden. I surprised the teacher by drawing a scene of a butcher’s shop we had passed by, with dead chickens hanging from a wire and a large butchered hog posed in the center of the composition.

My teacher was surprised by my choice of topics, but the picture of the animals seemed to capture my sense of irony in life that has remained with me throughout my career.

Art should be strong and edgy, just like life itself. That butcher shop portrayed the essence of our existence. Life is what it is. Sometimes you have to laugh; sometimes you have to cry. However, sometimes you get to choose which response you will display. You can be strong.

I discovered abstract art at a very specific point in 1998. An aunt pronounced the words that tore my world apart. “Mom is not going to be with us for very long.” My mother was dying of cancer and had been given an indefinite time, between two months and two years to live.

I was a mother’s boy and had been emotionally attached to her throughout my entire life up to that point. I couldn’t have imagined life apart from her. I had no idea how I would ever be able to survive her loss.

The night I received the news I began to create a self-portrait as a method of managing the awful storms that raged in my spirit.

I had always used a paintbrush before but now I began feverishly spreading colors upon the canvas with a palate knife. And then, without reflection, I suddenly began pouring salt into the paints. I have no idea where the urge to do that came from. I discovered that the salt added an interesting texture because it erupted through the paint creating little pores.

I also began adding some of my own hair to the portrait that was beginning to emerge on the canvas. I discovered that I was subconsciously posing myself in front of a bookshelf clothed in a white smock such as a doctor might wear.

I didn’t plan any of the images; they just happened that night. Also, without any reflection or thought, I scraped the eyes out with a palette knife in what seemed a violent act.

The portrait turned into meaningful self-disclosure. Perhaps I was hiding my emotions from the world. Perhaps I was showing how helpless I was to do what I felt I really had to do.

Creating that self-portrait changed me forever. Through an act of creation, I had exposed myself and had defined my abilities and limitations. Since then I have tried to live out the implications from those insights.

Mom hardly survived to live as long as the most pessimistic expectations and passed away two months after learning of the illness. Following her death I remained in my room. I wasn’t sulking nor was I even grieving in the normal meaning of the word. I was painting. I was simply doing what I had to do.

I began working almost around the clock and by the end of the month had completed 20 paintings. The unrelenting creative activity led me on a journey of discovery that included a lot of symbols revealing to my fevered imagination the existence of connections and interlocking realities that I had never imagined.

A Life of Art
I later began working professionally with my art but not full-time. I was working at a day job and doing art in the evenings and on weekends.

About a year ago, after I had been painting professionally for 15 years, I came to a moment of great clarity. I decided to do with my life what I really wanted to do.

I recognized that what I really wanted to do with my life was to be an artist. So I said to myself, “Ok, Bruno, if you’re going to do this you have to put 110 percent of yourself into it and make this happen.”

I became a man possessed by art. I started sleeping five hours a day and, except for timeout to fulfill unavoidable biological and social requirements, I spent the other 19 hours painting.

I recognize that my behavior seems compulsive, but it really isn’t, I think. They say that obsessive people don’t derive joy from their actions and the fact is I’m the happiest guy on earth when I am working on a canvas.

My self-portrait and that month of work started me down a path that led me to abstract art.

I did a lot of experimenting and exploring the possibilities of composition and elements. I especially developed a passion for manipulating light sources in my paintings. I think of regions of my paintings as being “moons,” by which I mean that the area is reflecting light that is being generated from some primary source either off the canvas or on.

Sometimes I can get a little careless about the composition, colors, and perspectives in a picture, but I always care about light.

A painting that has everything else – composition, perspective, color, etcetera – if it lacks light it will always be flat and empty. Everything revolves around the effects of whatever sources of illumination are part of a picture. People may miss the irony of one of my images, but anyone can appreciate light.

Perhaps because of my being born under the sign of Scorpio I have come to love the interplay of colors – those areas of transition from dark to light or from hot to cold

Even when I’m creating a pale gray I use as many bright colors as possible, applied in a way so that a person looking closely at the result can distinguish the separate colors.

The Act of Creation
My art focuses on process and not results. I find my activities to be exhausting. One result is that I continue repeatedly to make mistakes. But the mistakes turn into accidents, and so end up providing exactly what I was looking for. The accidents surprise me because I don’t anticipate them. The reaction of the paint to the movement of the various elements in the picture is unexpected. Sometimes the results are awful, of course, but in many cases they are wonderful. In every case the result is astonishing.

As I lay down the colors I begin to look for images. I never have to search for these emerging themes. In fact, I always face the opposite challenge of choosing the few that I will bring into full existence from among all the elements that I find embedded in a painting. Most of the time too many eyes are blinking at me and auditioning for the main role in my productions. Sometimes my intuition betrays me and I end up putting on the stage of my paintings some characters who don’t know how to dance.

I have sufficient imagination to create my own little world and am able to construct objects within the borders of a canvas that do not exist in the real world. My spirit is continually caught up in the creative process.

An abstract image is a small piece of something that I can grab and manipulate into being something else and expand into stand-alone all by itself. I paint realistic images as a way of understanding the background out of which the small abstraction can grow. It becomes a world in itself.

I focus my energies and attention upon the process, not the result. The issue isn’t what the picture ends up being but the progression that brought about its creation. The act of creation provides me with a personal vision and I identify myself from the creative process. This gives me the advantage of not having self-worth tied to a picture or to a body of work that I’ve created.

After all, right and wrong; pretty and ugly are relative. Shakespeare was right: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” But I have the disadvantage of not being able to rest on my accomplishments.

I’m allowed to do the thing I love doing only as long as I do it the right way. An artist who does the right thing in the wrong way is a failure no matter how many pretty pictures he paints.

Some of the elements in my paintings are playful. They look like something at one point but then a little later they appear to be something else. I let the painting and the canvas tell me where to go. I put a lot of layers over one another. Sometimes I scrape them off. That’s sometimes as fun an exercise in creativity as the painting itself was. Some paintings are failures. I worked on “Kido’s Playground” for months, and then scraped it off. I did that three times. I have buckets and boxes full of these scrapings.

Sometimes the results of the scrapings – the appearance of the canvas after its been cleared – reveal unexpected images that I can then use to create other and better pictures.

I know that my art is irrelevant to the problems in this world. I’m not solving anything or attempting to make people react in some way. I do these things for myself. People can enjoy what I’ve done, or not. In the big scale of things it doesn’t matter. I have no delusions of grandeur. A newly finished picture gives me an uplifting feeling if I’ve been successful. But the feeling doesn’t remain. I’ve got to get back into the process.°

You can see Bruno’s artwork on display from November through January at the Arts Commission Gallery in Brentwood’s Business and Technology Incubator, 101 Sand Creek Road, Brentwood.