David Rosales Bio
b. 1959 Loma Linda, California
BFA San Francisco Art Institute 1983
MFA Claremont Graduate University 2000
Article, The Flame, Magazine of Clairmont Graduate University, Fall 2005
An art statement:
"As a Chicano artist working in California at the start of the new century, I am compelled to look beyond traditional Chicano art concepts and embrace new methods for creation. I am still strongly influenced by my Mexican and California Chicano cultural heritage, but I include digital, Web, and installation work to my traditional methods of drawing and painting as my way of updating my artwork and bringing it closer to a contemporary global audience. As the Chicano culture changes, so must our artists, we must express these changes within our artwork in a way that reflects our individuality as people and our ideals as artists. There are many elements that go into my art making, some of these are physical and some are digital. My physical work includes paintings and installations, and my digital work includes 2d hardcopy and my Web site, http://www.elpayaso.com, where I create Web pieces that display my thoughts on art and contemporary culture. In my current paintings, I have been exploring the early panel painting technique of monochromatic underpainting with oil glazes in an attempt to revitalize my artwork by exploring pre-modernist techniques of realism and painting that relies more on drawing than color theory or physical tactile qualities. I have been painting portraits of post-colonial California using art historical narratives and visual references as a guide. These portraits are of Chicano people who sometimes do not realize their own history or culture; they are portraits of San Bernardino people lost in the melting pot of a small Southern California city.
From the Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art Book
Published by The Bilingual Press, 2002
"David Rosales
was raised by parents with a strong pride in their Latino heritage, and they
impressed that pride on David and his siblings. In addition, he was educated
in a parochial school by nuns from Mexican backgrounds, which strengthened his
sense of cultural heritage. In high school and college he explored that heritage
by means of his artwork. Following high school, Rosales pursued his art education
at the San Francisco Art Institute, earning his B.F.A in 1983. Along with his
creative training Rosales studied art history, learning about Diego Rivera’s
and other Mexican masters artwork. However he recalls that he learned “very
little about contemporary Chicano art.” Following graduation in the mid
1980’s, he and other artists in the San Bernardino area began making trips
to Los Angeles to attend Chicano art openings and to began to learn more about
the contemporary Chicano artwork being created in L.A. at the time. Ultimately
Rosales formed professional associations with some of the Los Angeles Chicano
artists, but he remained based in the San Bernardino area and maintained his
separate artistic identity. Of his current portrait series he has commented:
“These are portraits of San Bernardino people, lost in the melting pot
of a small Southern California city, they are familiar and surreal.” Rosales
began to teach drawing and painting at San Bernardino Valley College in 1995
with only his B.F.A. and professional history but a few years later enrolled
at Claremont Graduate University, earning his M.F.A. In 2000. It was during
his time at Claremont that he began to explore digital techniques, finding ways
to combine them with traditional mediums and thus entered a new phase of his
career.
As an artists, Rosales
has been pursuing new ways of working in the digital and Internet-enabled media
that have gained ascendancy in recent years. His pursuit of art at the edge
of new technologies combined with his use of painting techniques that refer
back to the early Renaissance places Rosales in a unique creative position.
His choice of geographic residence adds further to this provocative conflux.
Rosales has made a conscious decision to maintain his career in San Bernardino,
a modest-sized city in southern California, located roughly fifty miles east
of the glow of Los Angeles. This has proved to be incredibly important to the
artist as he investigates the evolving relationships of emerging Mexican and
Chicano culture without the distorting pressures of a hypermediated exposure.
Rosales has claimed an important integrity of place that allows his art to flourish,
providing the viewer an opportunity to absorb a vision that is as technologically
savvy as it is unobstructed.
Burden of Culture and History Project is a work of art that exists in many pieces, giving new meaning to the definition of mixed media. Consisting of an arrangement of what Rosales terms “Information Stacks,” this work features a series of conceptually constructed elements representative of the artist’s dissected Chicano identity. There are traces of the Chicano movement evident in the aerosol can labeled with the United Farm Workers’ eagle emblem. Below this is the distinct piece Spaz As an Angel. Recalling the early European panel-painting style, this image serves as an important bridge between the art historical and contemporary cultural sources of Rosales’s art. Two smaller images below this level create a layer of Mexican references. An organic structure emerges when these aspects of the work are considered with the hieroglyphic imagery at the base of the piece, suggesting an evolving Chicano identity. This is further realized by the hypertextual nature of the work, as the dialogue it initiates in physical form is continued on Rosales’s Web site http://www.elpayaso.com. This solidifies the artist's important contribution to the emerging Chicano art movement on the Internet."
Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art University of Arizona, Bilingual Press 2002
