Transcript: Marc Trujillo - Painter

For Art's Sake
Episode “Marc Trujillo”

Marc: I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico and where I'm from there is about a 2000 foot raise in altitude, the altitude is very high like you're a mile above sea level and that air is very dry. You are always aware that you are about this big, which makes sense to me as a worldview and manifest itself may be especially, clearly in my painting behind me in the way that I scaled the figures to the painting.
It is important that they are specific, that they look like they are doing what they are doing, but they are definitely held in check by their relative scale. So it is not really, I would not say it is insignificance, but I would say it is relative significance definitely. The sort of space is the main character, the figures are important supporting characters that I want to be convincing, but they are supporting.
And all these places are not meant for you to be there in the present and I think, you know, that they are not designed for you to enjoy really. They are high-volume, they are meant for you to move through, to pass through, and that is a lot of what we spend our lives doing. We live in a huge city, and we live in a city where these places are all over the place, and when you're in these places you could be sort of anyway. That kind of anonymity is one of the horrors of modern life.
On the other hand, I don't despise these places; I am not trying to be critical about them. I am trying to hold a balance and sort of show them and be concise about them; I like that balance the two sides of them are important to me for me to stay interested in looking at something for a long time. As opposed to being something that is one-sided, like isn't this great or isn't this bad, because both of those things play out for me much more quickly.
How I get from seeing something that I think will make a good painting, to drawing it through initially in a sketchbook, with smaller drawings. I sort of sort out how I think, what I looked at that would make a good painting and then distilling that through continuing to draw and going to a larger drawing to develop it more, to be a little more concise about what I want out as a painting.
I like the larger occasion of this sort of space, there is something’s that are definitely invented. I mean these are fiction, but some of the thing is that I decide to make fictive aren't necessarily, they are very impassive. This is fiction, but that is formal, I like how the Orange held up the top of the painting in terms of color that it needed. There is both like additive and reduction, things that I took out. I will show you in the drawing of there was a big battery stand right here, which sort of made it harder to get to this big stretch of linoleum with these fluorescent lights coming back off of it, which is a lot of what I like about this. I took that out, and her I put in actually, David was with me when I sort of followed this woman around because I liked her, I like what she had on.
The painting gets cast, after I sort of figured out what the space is going to be, then I started casting, I put the figures and as sort of a counterpoint to the architecture to try to help the way the viewer’s eye moves through the space. You know, one of the most, when I'm scaling up the painting from the grezeye, to the painting surfaces I will start with coloured pencil and I will start figuring out, I will start going from interval to interval.
I will put the vanishing point on the painting. I will start building things up, because in terms of thinking things through visually, interval is sort of the most fundamental tool. Like how close are things together, how close are things to the side of the painting, you know what is the sort of proportional relation, what sort of rhythms do you set up. Are they rhythms that are interesting or are they part of the character of the space that you want to convey what are they've something that is less considered as a part of what you want to convey.
Reading is a way of describing to me that is much less open ended then the way things look, and is much less interesting to me than the way things look. When you write a word on a painting, like when you write a word on a wall your eye is pulled to the factual surface, so it goes from this illusion, this sort of space that I've taken a lot of care to articulate right back to the flat surface. I do as much as I can in the paintings to sort of knowledge towards the visual, rather than the textual.
Bruegel it is, in terms of a literary person that I really respond to, a painting like the Fall of Icarus, where you have this story of Icarus is plunging into the water in the middle of the painting and it does not matter. The guy is ploughing in the foreground.
Historically painting is about 250 000 years older than written language, developmentally kids do some sort of mark making as a way to try to organize your sensory experience that forms a foundation for language, like pan culturally. So painting or some kind of mark making is a precondition, a necessary precondition to make this statement that it does not matter.