Artospective: Figurative, Realistic Paintings by Patricia Guzman.

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An Interview with Patricia Guzman.

Who and where are you from?

Painter born and raised in Mexico City.

How you got into this?

Born in artistic family, denied painting until life itself gave me no choice, I had to paint in order to earn some money and survive, painting was the only thing I could do having no degree. However, when I was 27 I realized how wise life had been, how it made total sense that painting was the path for me. From that moment on, I embraced painting with full commitment, as I got to understand a much deeper meaning for it.

What is your driving force?

To create something new, something that has never seen before, to stop the viewer’s mind for a moment and transport them to a different world. To add something to the canon of art, to make art that could transcend cultures and time.

What kind of work you do and why?

Figurative, realistic images of different realities that speak about our experience as human beings, of the emotions shared by all. I feel affected of the things happening around me and feel the need to speak about it through paint.

Painting is so fascinating as the way I understand it, it is a path to the inner self, it is a constant voyage to getting to know oneself better and to remove the systems of beliefs and thoughts that don’t belong to the self. It is a cleansing process of unearthing the sacred jewels we all have, deep inside. It is to believe in this voice as we’ve been programmed to listen to the outside instead of the inside. Therefore, the hardest part and most rewarding is to believe in this voice and to have to courage to follow it through. I think it is a lifelong challenge that makes life worth living in a passionate, fullest way.

Please tell us more about your thought process.

I love the way light dances across a face or figure, I like to paint in big or medium formats (larger than life) so that we can see a face in a distinct perspective from our everyday point of view. I’d like people to stop and to look to a native person’s face in a completely different way, being larger than life and being filled with so much information such as the wrinkles, the changes in tones and colors but most importantly, the expression, the feelings. The lyrics of the son echoes by Pink Floyd deeply resonate with the feeling I have when painting a portrait:

..By chance two separate glances meet

And I am you and what I see is me ..

Being this my supreme objective for people to have when looking at the work.

I observe the world around me and there are many things that cause pain and frustration. I feel the need to say something about it through paint, perhaps it is my way of coping with it, of trying to understand, of stopping the world around me and allowing that to happen, to not deny it. I am not trying to change any person point of view, or trying to mirror reality, it’s just a need for me, of shedding light into the terrible situations around us. Examples of this are paintings like: Forgotten, Justice, 43, Vivasnosqueremos .. YA BASTA" (We want us alive .. STOP).