Jon Gamél, San Diego
Member Since August 2019
Artist Statement As I’ve walked the streets of cities around the world, I couldn’t help but notice the expressions on the faces around me, expressions that have shaped my art. I have been an artist for as long as I can remember. As a child of six, I watched my mother toil over the canvas for endless hours creating her view of the world. I knew then that I would one day paint a fantastical reality. It took years of training and re-training my soul. The world changed, my reality changed, and I wondered when I would tap back into who I really was.
Painting came back into my life at 40. At first, the manifestations were expressionless. The skill was there, and yet my soul yearned for beauty with more meaning. I took time off and completely axed a series of paintings and dug deeper into my soul. One day that meaning walked into my living room in the form of Tim, a 75-year-old gay man. There was nothing particularly unusual about him, although I hadn't known a gay man of that age. He stayed for over an hour while I photographed every part of him, hoping that I would somehow catch a glimpse of the person inside. Somehow I related to Tim. Though I had never known him, working with him gave me the strength to push myself out of my comfort zone, beyond my religious upbringing, to open up fully to who I am, and who we all are as gay men.
Emotion happens when the inner experience of a subject elicits it. In a commercialized world, we are inundated with someone else’s idea of what it means to be perfect. This is especially true in the gay world, where we are perpetually bombarded by very trendy images of youth, an image that we all eventually fall short of. It became important for me to express a deeper and often imperfect reality in my artwork -- to walk into a room and stare deep into the soul of those subjects on the walls.., to break stereotypes from both the left and the right and create a heightened understanding of the issues we face as human beings…I want to see what my subjects thinking, and to create wonder and excitement… no matter the subject. This is the goal of my work.
There is beauty in both abstraction and reality. That's why the materials that form the backbone of my work are an expression of the subject on a deeper plane. Paintings on canvas have their own life, but paintings over pieces of found items and patterns from the world take the work onto another plane. From here, a story emerges. Not only does the viewer have a glimpse into the subject's soul, he can physically see the images and materials surrounding someone’s life. It's for this reason that I have chosen to paint with oil on transparent materials such as plexiglass and resin. I then overlay these pieces over abstract backgrounds made from found materials such as computer chips, old photographs, wood type or patterns.
Though I draw my color theory from artists of the renaissance (Michelangelo and Caravaggio), my composition is entirely rooted in 21st Century design. My preference is for the body to be relaxed yet dramatic in order to reflect wonder and excitement. At the same time, I prefer hard design, fonts, straight edges, Japanese patterns, wood type, lines, and architectural elements. More recent influences in my work are derived from Ron English, Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, Ian Cumberland, and Matt Doust. It is through all of these influences, that my work takes on a life of its own.
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