David Rosales David Rosales
b. 1959, Loma Linda, CA
There are many elements that go through me in my art making process. Some of these elements
are visual and some are conceptual. I have always relied on my ability to render in a
representational manner what ever image my art called for in a variety of traditional artmaking
techniques, it is a skill I have had most of my adult life. I have used this ability to render
correctly in different ways, from commercial illustrations for pay to drawing demonstrations for
classes that I teach, but I find that I use this skill in my drawing and paintings as a strong visual
grab for my audience. The ability to render correctly in a traditional manner is very important in
my current work. My art making process has evolved to a point where I am deconstructing
current and past work and reconstructing new concepts for my artwork at a very quick pace.
Time and timelines blur within my mind and I work with the idea that all of my artmaking is
even and equal and in this manner I work and develop several lines of artwork at the same time.
These lines include drawings, painting, video and digital-computer generated artwork for the
Internet. I work them together including references within the different arenas of my artistic
descriptions. A web based page may include a digital image of one of my paintings, possibly
manipulated to the point where it is vastly altered from the original oil on panel or an oil on
panel may have a World Wide Web reference that reflects digital culture. It has always been
important to me to tie all my artmaking together, to somehow have a relationship between my
painting, digital drawings and web based work.
Primarily I am a painter, but I explore diverse media because my artistic vision takes on many
aspects of visual expression that uses multi-media as its way of getting out, but painting is
primary. I have been painting and using paint for the past 30 years and I have developed my way
of manipulating the illusions of representation that modernism has taught me. I have been using
paint in the manner I was taught at the San Francisco Art Institute by the students of Diebenkorn
and other bay area figurative painters of the 1950s, this is the push and pull method of using
paint in the most visceral and textural way possible. I was taught that the most important thing
about a painting is how the artist used paint, if they could use paint was the first critique my
professors at SFAI taught me. It was all about the qualities and possibilities of paint as a single
entity, separate and much more important than concept, imagery, narrative or drawing. This
perception of using paint that I have cultivated inside of me for the past 20 years has been a
developing ideal for me and has lead me to some beautiful dead ends. These beautiful dead ends
resulted in paintings that were large, colorful and well painted but lacked any honest power
because of their lack of contemporary iconography and narrative that is important to my present
artwork. These large vacuous canvases were popular and I do have a successful career as an
artist, but a need to change and develop my artwork is stronger than my desire to repeat my past
successes. Although as an artist I do refer to my past work in my present body of work and as I
get older I have more of a history to refer to. I am currently investigating the early panel painting
technique of monochrome underpainting with transparent glazes of oil paint applied over the
structure of the monochrome drawing. This technique is vastly different from any I have worked
with previously. It is highly structured and relies on precise drawing as a foundation. With this
investigation of a 500 year old painting technique I have pulled together my painting, drawing,
and digital work in a way where they all work together in a contemporary dialogue with heavy
narrative and graphic qualities that read equally as paintings, digital drawings or webwork on the
Internet. Using the Internet has opened many possibilities for the presentation of my artwork to
a global audience who would never have been aware of my artwork previously. The Internet has
created a venue that has no real gallery structure, but is purely exhibition space without walls or
market. I enjoy using the Internet as a way of disseminating my work to a global audience and I
am building my website El Payaso.com as my site on the Internet where I can display my work
to anyone with access.
For the past 10 years I have worked on developing my name as a Chicano artist separate from the
control of the Chicano Art world of Los Angeles, but because my name is Latino and I live in
Southern California I have always been not only associated with the Chicano artist of east los but
I can have fun commenting on my tenuous association with them. I have for years been
considered a muralist, and this assumption on the part of art agencies and schools probably has
more to do with the fact that I am of Mexican decent and the cultural child of Rivera, Orozco
and Siqueros or Lujan, Romero or Almaraz than the fact that I had ever painted any murals in my
life. I am considered a muralist because I am of Mexican/Latino/Chicano decent and a
Mexican/Latino/Chicano artist, and for no other reason. These kind of misconceptions feed my
artmaking now. Where someone may take these misconceptions as a defeat or distraction, I use
these things to feed my artwork. I have taken the concept of making Chicano art to a different
place and that place is an exaggeration of what Chicano art might be. I have sometimes
exaggerated my ethnicity in my work to the point of comedy as a way of commenting on others
misconceptions of what Chicano art could be about. I have developed characters and themes in
my work that describe these exaggerations and at the same time express my views on
colonialism and the assimilation conflicts of a less than average Southern California city.
My character of “El Payaso” is just one of the inhabitants of my less than average Southern
California city vision who depicts my dissolution with American life and culture. The term “El
Payaso” translates into English as “The Clown”, but this Spanish use of this term in the context
of a character from a Southern California city has more flavoring to it than just a funny clown. El
Payaso is also a nickname a Latin kid might get as a member of a gang or it could be a family
nickname. It is both negative and positive, it is tragic and funny at the same time. This character
of the clown, the jester or trickster is in many cultures and is used to express serious issues
through humor with the ugly realities just under the surface, this is how I use this character in my
narrative. El payaso is the outsider who I bring in to my work as a way of creating just one face
of the characters who makes up my comment on contemporary California culture. He is a
depiction of some of the Latino youth I see and know, I think about him and I know him.