Artist Statement.

Diego Gutiérrez, born in 1989, Capilla de Guadalupe, Jalisco, Mexico.

Without a doubt, art has been present throughout my life, from when I contemplate the sunrise with its diverse hues, to the sunset with its magical colors, expressions on faces that say so much without speaking, that's what art is, colors and textures that if they could speak, they would say what I am.

2013, the year in which an interest in drawing was awakened in me, something that has undoubtedly been the most wonderful and fortuitous encounter I've ever had. Once I understood that my hands could speak through brushes and canvases, this—art—became the most wonderful area of ​​my life. My work in this field has certainly completely changed the way I perceive life, express it, feel it, and make it felt.

I'm primarily an amateur and passionate about drawing and painting. I've had a lot of help along the way. In addition to this, I take on portrait commissions and have continued to find my way by making, reading, and studying the works of realist artists whom I greatly admire.

My creative process is anchored by photography and life. Drawing from life and making copies of Old Masters is what I consider an effective means of learning, capturing everyday life and reflecting the times I live in. This is what gives me a sense of belonging and what motivates me to create.

The identity of my projects emerges from photography, as they are a reference for my work. Oil painting is a technique I enjoy because it's not an improvised process. It forces me to plan, build my color palette, take notes, and draw a preliminary sketch. Then, I approach the canvas, keeping in mind that if I do my best at the beginning, the work will take shape in subsequent layers, and I'll have fewer difficulties in the end.

Pencil drawing has a similar process: if I'm as perfect as possible at first, the final results will be better. I like to work with a single technique, without mixing them up—whether it's graphite, charcoal, or sanguine—and I use paper in different shades.

I like works that are easy to understand, and that's undoubtedly what has made me perceive life more naturally right now, showing the beauty in simplicity, everyday faces that express fragility, but at the same time, complicity and complementarity with the environment, outlining words that captivate.

The passion for my roots, the liveliness of my culture, that which gives symbolic, ideological, artistic, aesthetic significance, has influenced in such a way that I can adopt that which was mine and that now defines me, the appropriation of historical memory through values, beliefs, forms that in their immaterial and anonymous character have given me identity, elements that I assume as my own and that naturally become me, not only as a historical reference, but that have made me part of a collective that proudly bears on its face the cultural heritage that defines it. 

I believe that the gifts that Life gives us do not belong to us, they are to be shared, so through the pencil I wish to make you feel the same love and passion that identifies me.