Luis Daniel Gutierrez

As a native of Phoenix, Luis Gutierrez has matured as an artist and painter alongside the developing Phoenix culture and arts scene. Luis first began exploring the arts in his high school art room and consuming works in the Phoenix galleries of the mid-80’s. In college, he studied the arts in London, where he was exposed to European culture and was driven to discover his own individuality while in the midst of English society.

Since returning to Phoenix in ’93, Luis has been a part of the downtown community and continued to develop as an individual and artist in the Southwest. His work explores themes true to his life, such as his Chicano heritage and his lifelong exploration of the spiritual. He also labors to explore and express his dealing with Multiple Sclerosis, which he was diagnosed with in his mid-20’s, for both himself and those confronted with the condition.

Luis’s works can be seen during several temporary exhibitions at Phoenix galleries and currently at Dulce Bean in downtown Phoenix. In 2007, he was selected as an emerging artist to be including in a traveling exhibition of the Heard Museum, and, in 2008, his pieces will be displayed in the Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

Early on a recent mid-week morning, Phoenix Art Space caught Luis for coffee at his downtown coffee shop to talk about his work and life in the downtown scene.

Phoenix Art Space: How long have you worked as an artist in Phoenix?

Luis Gutierrez: I went to high school here in south Phoenix, where I discovered art. I hated my high school, and the only solace I had was the art room. I just thought I was good at it. I went to the art room anytime I could, or I went to the library, and I produced and found that I was good at it and liked it. It was something I could do without having to think about everything else. It was a good release.

From there, I went to college at NAU, which I absolutely hated. This was in the late 80’s. Then, I met a girl from London, and moved there and got in a program at the University of London for a semester. I decided to move to London after that and did an art program at Richmond University, and that was it: it was on.

PAS: Did you go right to painting, or did you play with other forms first?

LG: I’ve always been a painter. I’ve always been captivated by painters, starting probably with Picasso as a little kid, looking through Picasso books.

PAS: Do you have any devices, perspectives, or ambitions that are central to your work?

LG: Trying to sum up things. When dealing with people in my personal life, they’re always saying, “You deal in classifications.” I want to have the definite – knowing that there isn’t any definite forever - but I want to capture a moment, and that is what I work for. Then I try to put it in a symbol, so I can have a power symbol, or a place mark or a branding. That’s my central goal, to brand thoughts and feelings and movements and time and put them together.

PAS: How do you see painting as unique in achieving those goals?

LG: I guess it’s the idea of the classical painter with the palette. I like paint: I like pushing the stuff around. And it’s almost like sign painting. I like to say I’m painting road signs for people to give them a very basic understanding of what’s coming next or where they’re at now.

PAS: Does living in the downtown arts community have much of any effect on your work?

LG: Arizona has so much energy that it’s amazing - not just the arts scene, but the whole downtown scene. I’ve lived downtown since I came back from London in ’93, and to be able to see the same people over and over again, going to the local 7th St. and McDowell Safeway, seeing them there and saying hello: it’s amazing. You are not just seeing them as artists, but as people buying groceries just like you.

I think that’s great, just to know other people are working when you’re working. That says something. Maybe they’re not working on the same idea you are, but they’re working on what they thing is amazing and great. And they are there to bounce ideas off of.

PAS: Do you see the downtown community as having a strong identity?

LG: Growing up here, I’ve always been into the arts, and so I’d stop into galleries when I was in high school, and what I saw, which I still see, is a resistance to time and to whatever politics are going on. There’s a resistance to being defined. We are a people that want to come up with our own definitions.

PAS: Do you work to maintain a specific identity in your own work?

LG: I think the idea trying to maintain an identity in your work is secondary to trying to maintain an identity within yourself. I think if you’re more yourself, more of yourself will go into your work and it will represent yourself.

PAS: You’ve talked before about the transformations of self that people go through as they constantly explore who they are. How do you explore and express those changes in your work?

LG: You have to know yourself. You can’t come out with anything if you don’t know yourself, and people have to sit down and figure out who they are, constantly, since they are always in flux. I’m an emotional person, and to figure myself out, I’ll sit down and try to figure out what the hell I’m feeling. Then I think, “If I could sum up how I’m feeling, how would it be?”

PAS: So it’s something you do prior to your work – trying to pin something down and then represent it visually?

LG: It’s trying to pin it down, or it’s making a drawing of it and then going, “Oh my God, is that what it is? Well then maybe I can put this on this image.”

PAS: Does your cultural background play a big role in your work?

LG: Huge. I was schooled in England for my upper-classmen years, and England is stuffy and dry. You have people that are very highbrow or intellectual and all that - and I’m not from that. I’m from an intellectual people, but who aren’t intellectual for the sake of it, but who are for the purpose of accomplishing something.

I realized in England that I was from a working class people. The people who come to this country, they work, they make it happen - and that’s what I’m from. In England, I started drawing bits from my culture. Then I came back to the U.S. and realized that was my work. It was like a homecoming, and those little drawings, those were my work; it is who I am and what I should be doing: it’s the most honest thing that I could ever do.

PAS: Your work often includes a single figure surrounded by an aura of abstract shapes, symbols, and objects. How do you see that as a representation of the self and identity?

LG: In college, you do anything you can to grow and learn. In England, I got into shamanism and the whole new age idea of life. It was like a new understanding of religion or of deity. Through that, I learned about the idea that people have different sorts of auras and loved the idea. I started reading about auras and that brought me back to the Virgin of Guadalupe, one of the greatest figures in my life. For most Mexicans I know, the virgin is so central to life. I started drawing the Virgin of Guadalupe and trying to make it as loud and as proud as I could. From that, I started putting auras on everything and everybody and having a great time with it. If a person has an aura, and they love something, then their aura goes to that thing. Maybe that thing has an aura. Where does it stop? I went from the Virgin of Guadalupe, then, to putting auras around anything.

It’s the easiest way to tell another person what is happening inside the painting. It’s so basic and forthcoming that I think it turns off a lot of people, and that’s fine. It’s a road sign; it’s not supposed to be something you can spend hours looking at and get more from each time you look at it. I want it quick. I want it for now.

PAS: Why do you focus on individuals?

LG: I’m making a visual alphabet. Hopefully one of these days, I’ll be able to put them all together and make sentences.

PAS: What sort of role has living with Multiple Sclerosis played in your work?

LG: When I came back from England, strange things were happening to me. I was diagnosed with MS, since my mother had MS. I was having trouble seeing and walking and talking - all classic symptoms of MS. Then, it basically went away for six of seven years. In 2000, it started again and didn’t let up until 2002. That got me focused on the MS. At that time, I was also focused on making my painting career work. I had a wife and a child. And then I get MS, so I focused on it.

I took a class called “Taking the Leap” in California on how to be an artist – how to do this. After that, I broke it down – summed it up, as I do. I’m Hispanic, I have a disease, and I’m into the spiritual. So I saw different avenues there. There’s the spiritual that has grown into an industry now. There’s the Chicano movement in the arts, so that could be explored more. Then there was the MS, which was kicking my ass at the time. So I went with the thing that was on top of me then.

I started putting images together and opened the flood gates, and hundreds of images came up of what I was feeling, or how people were treating me, or what it was like to be a disabled person. It was a profound change, and so I mapped that out.

Then I started looking through the MS Society’s library and online for works about MS. I’m a visual person, and I don’t understand sites as much as I do a drawing. As I started looking for that and didn’t see it, I was like, “Okay, there is a place for me, so I’m going to go gung-ho for it.” I made a series about MS and decided to make a book of the images for the MS society, so they will have something to lend to other people when they want to learn what it’s like to have an attack. I wanted them to have a book and see what it’s like, for those people that don’t understand science.

PAS: As you continue to experience new things and change, do you see your craft changing in the future?

LG: I think I’m going to get more 3D. I have a few different sub-series that I’m working on. Modernism started when Picasso and his people getting works from the East and Africa and Japan. Matisse started rocking Japan’s stuff, working the ideas of Japanese works into French work. Picasso started getting cubism from Africa. At the same time, Einstein was coming up with the idea of different realities. Then, in the U.S., Jackson Pollock found Native American work and started mixing that in his work. If that’s the case, what happens if I start putting my art into the West, and the West starts putting my culture into theirs? What happens when a Mexican discovers England? I like playing with that idea.

PAS: Do you see your work maintaining the same sort of visual organization and aesthetic?

LG: I work with paintings with a central figure, and I want to start working 3D with a central figure – like little Santos and the stuff that I grew up with in the Catholic Church, like the saints. I want to make my own deities. Why can’t I make my own devotional objects? I find that humorous and funny and a little bit sneaky and silly.

But I want to do it out of trash. I’m working with sticks that I find at the river bottom. They’re going to break down and turn to dust, but right now they’re trash that is in the way. Well, I’ll pick it up and I’ll make a saint out of it. My people are from that. We are a people that will make things out of nothing. We’ll make a life, a lifestyle, a whole new understanding out of having nothing. Look at the immigrants that come over: they have nothing. That’s how I see it: I can fashion something out of nothing.