Elmer Guevara
LA-based artist, Elmer Guevara received a BFA in drawing and painting at Cal State Long Beach and his MFA at Hunter College, New York.
His paintings take inspiration from childhood concepts and memories. As a 2nd generation immigrant, he is interested in dissecting his upbringing and questioning the ways in which he was brought up.
In a studio visit with Elmer, He spoke about the motifs in his work as “something that’s always around in my childhood” — beer bottles, writings on sidewalks, and places in Los Angeles. Guevara is informed by his experiences. The two paintings feature fences imagined from the times he worked in a fencing company and the other a glimpse of a memory; him and his friends hanging out late at night at Elysian Park overlooking the dodgers stadium while a baseball game is going on.
Being able to see Elmer’s process and color choices were inspiring to me. He only uses Williamsburg oil pants and he likes to clean his palette thoroughly to avoid accidental color mixes. His artistic practice is deliberate and intentional from beginning to end.
Guevara jots down his ideas on his leather-bound sketchbooks, where he writes notes about what the painting will be about, how it is structured compositionally, and specific details about some aspects of the painting.
Each painting starts with a sketch, drafting out the seed idea. In the past, he has also made painted studies in lieu of the initial sketch as mock-ups for possible color combinations and composition.
Upon analyzing his paintings, I notice that he has proficiently managed pictorial space in his work. I asked him how he came up with the layering of spaces, to which we talked about the rabatment of the rectangle in painting. He also recommended reading the book, “Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting” by William Dunning. The book goes into historical painting and how the use of space generates dimensional illusions in painting.
A detail shot of the painting, Pensive on the Layers Underneath, featuring some delicately painted dandelions and P-22’s face; a mountain lion that roamed the Los Angeles mountains for years and had recently died — a homage to the city.
Upon chatting about the painting, Hot Hand in a Dice Game, Elmer talks about competition in his upbringing and the importance of winners and losers in his community growing up. I admired his expression of a fight breaking out from the perspective of seeing shadows on an outdoor fence. The neighbors’ dogs peering through peepholes show a feeling of intrigue or a cause for concern from behind the fence, while the viewer is placed in the middle of the fight but forced to see the shadow cast, broken fence, beer bottles, etc. There is a sense of hope to break free and a lingering sense of being walled in, but not entirely.
Both paintings are currently on view at Lyles & King in NYC.
Images and writing courtesy of Clarisse Abelarde