Angel Villanueva

Late summer, year unknown. We were on a walk through the countryside, a leisurely trek under the luminous twilight after sundown. The road was flanked by dense trees of a dark emerald, the homes nested between them increasing in frequency as we got closer to town. At times, glimpses of grassy hills beyond led up to great purple mountains in the distance.

Striding confidently beside me was a longtime friend. He was a delight to be with as always; cultured, intelligent and congenial, a dashing presence not of our time. His fine, formal attire—pin-striped trousers, tail coat, top hat, immaculate white gloves—was as naturally becoming to his graceful, athletic frame as was his handsome face.¹ We were talking about our plans for the rest of summer when I stopped, in utter disbelief, before the house on our left.

“This is impossible… I lived in this house when I was a child…” The shock had turned my voice into a whisper.

Before us was an abandoned adobe building, a single-story row of doors and windows spanning half a block before turning the corner. The very first unit—one door, one window—had been my home, a place my mother rented for about a year when I was little. It was still the only part of the building painted a sickly pink, the color an incongruous touch on a façade of an otherwise uniform, dirty white.

I walked up to the door and pushed it. It was unlocked, yielding open without effort or sound. I stepped inside, surprised by how small the space seemed now. The two rooms, connected by a doorway, were empty. It was evident from the dust and debris collected on the floor that no one had been here for many, many years. The door to the back patio was missing, and through that opening I could see what was once an outdoor kitchen, the adobe forms long eroded by rain and neglect into shapes barely recognizable as a wood stove and bread oven.

My 18^th century companion leaned on the doorway, observing me gravely. He had taken his hat off and was slowly turning it in his gloved hands, strands of wavy blond hair now framing his face. He looked uneasy. I was too. It felt as if we were carrying out a desecration the moment I opened that door.

“These rooms are still haunted by that memory.” He said.

I nodded. They were. The setting was home to my earliest memories of terror: my mother fell seriously ill for the first time while we lived here. I was six years old, and the place was said to be haunted then. It certainly was now. There was a strong, nauseating energy latent in it. The atmosphere felt dense, laden with something old and ill, something of death, an enduring, sad and immovable presence indifferent to our trespass but powerful as a curse. I feared this unctuous malaise would permeate my clothes, my skin, my body,  that it would cling to me like an invisible madness and pollute the rest of my life. We had to leave.

Then, as if they had suddenly materialized, I saw the paintings.

Three framed oils on canvas, painted in the French realist style, hung on the walls of the first room. I had no conscious recollection of them until now. It all came flooding in, faster than I could process. The paintings had been there when we moved in, and were obviously far older than my memory of them. Whoever hung them placed one by the entry, one on the wall that separated the two rooms, and one by the door leading to the backyard. We never touched them, and evidently, no one else had.

“I can’t believe this…. hanging, unseen, for decades…” I spoke quietly, absorbed. I turned to him. He held my gaze. We both knew, in that moment, that I would be taking the paintings with me.

The pigments had faded a great deal, but overall the images were well preserved. The frames were nailed directly to the stucco. A strange way of hanging paintings, I thought, as if the intent had been to crucify them.²

I carefully began to pull the first one from the wall. It was a bust portrait decorated with an oval mat. The sitter was a pale woman in a white blouse, her red hair pulled up about her head. Her gentle expression barely managed to balance the otherwise somber tone of the painting. She must have been in her late twenties when the portrait was made. Who was she? I wondered. The frame felt flexible, soft almost. The nails gave up easily, shedding bits of rust as they came out. I leaned it against the wall.

The next work was a small view of an old city, a patchwork of roofs, walls and cobblestone pathways. The town looked deserted. The picture seemed to have been painted from life, and the composition was strict: were it not for its painterly atmospheric depth and the rich detailing of its surfaces, it would have come close to geometric abstraction. It came off the wall easily as well.

The largest of the three paintings—and oddly for my taste, the one that fascinated me most—was a countryside view painted in thick impasto. Its execution set it apart from the other two: a hint of expressionism had made its way into the brushwork, with paint volumes accentuating forms and adding a contained dynamism to the stillness. In it, the dark brown planks of a wooden fence contrasted with the faded olive green of a grassy field behind, leading to a dark tree line beyond. Part of the horizon was visible, and in it, the faintest suggestion of a town under cloud cover seemed to tremble with the murmur of distant events. The frame was broken in places, I feared it would fall apart in my hands, but it held together as I pulled it from the wall.³

In the awe of the discovery, numbed by the unsettling atmosphere of the space, and fighting off the rising pain of memories unvisited for ages, I sought to understand the origin of these images; I felt it was my duty to do so before taking them—I felt the trespass warranted it. Someone before me had understood and kept them together. It was my turn to do the same.

What did these pictures have in common? They were obviously contemporaries and related to each other: depictions of a town, its countryside, and perhaps one of its residents. Although varying in approach, the brushwork and color palette suggested the same hand. Who painted them? When? Where? No signatures. No dates… Beautiful paintings marred by a lugubrious heaviness, the silence of loss.

Loss… The realization swept my mind like a tidal wave: The paintings were made after the plague. The portrait of the woman was posthumous.

Narratives began weaving in my head. I could only imagine the countless stories of pain and horror behind these images. They made sense. Perfect sense. I couln’d bear to think about it any longer, not there, not in that place that was now more than ever a tomb in my mind. I stacked the paintings on each other and put them all under my arm.

“The plague…” He said as I turned to him. “I think so…” I whispered back.

On the walls, white rectangles of emptiness punctuated by stigmata screamed of undead nightmares.

“Let’s go.”

It felt good to get back on the street, out the ill atmosphere of the abandoned house. We walked briskly, our steps in synch. Interrupted by the archaeological find, our carefree dynamic could not be resumed. Its place had been usurped by the silence of complicity and a nameless, insistent concern. I couldn’t wait to get to my car, to put the paintings in the trunk, to shut them in the dark. I feared them. I feared that it was they who created the horror I felt back in those rooms, rather than being mere witnesses to it. They were alive with that sick energy and I had begun to realize it was a force that could not be contained or escaped from. I didn’t know what I would do with them.

I wanted to thank him for being my accomplice in the theft, but then I thought: Is this really a theft? I wondered if anyone had seen us. I wondered, strangely, if there were cameras monitoring the area, if the removal of the paintings had been recorded from a distance. Stranger still, I wondered if my handsome friend would even show up in such a recording.

We walked on, past the gates, into the city.

:: :: ::

1. I often wonder who these characters are who visit me in my dreams. The man in this sequence was not dressed in costume; those were his usual clothes. He made me think of the high society of early America. In the dream’s internal logic, I remembered him; we talked as if we had known each another well for a very long time. Perhaps he has been a recurring character for a while and my memory of him is crossing into daylight for the first time. Who knows… I do not recall a name.

2. Hanging is also an execution. Like the limp body of a dead criminal hanging at the square, paintings on display are captures and examples at once.

3. The first thing I did after documenting this dream was to call my sister in Mexico. I asked her if she remembered that house, if there had been paintings in it. She remembers the place but can’t say whether there were any paintings. She was four years old when we lived there, her memory of the place is much dimmer than mine. She does, however, remember the stories about the haunting.

What is haunting to my mind is how vividly I remember the pictures. They have the distinct quality of an unearthed memory; it’s hard for me to think of them as an elaborate invention of the subconscious. I could reproduce them easily. Fear of awakening something I may not be ready—or able—to deal with, and perhaps remaining figments of superstition in my otherwise empirical mind, prevent me from even trying.

It was at that house that I created a painting for the first time. I received a set of watercolors as a birthday present from my mother when I turned seven. It would make sense, if these paintings existed, that I would have been inspired by them somehow.

The building was demolished many years ago. My mother, the only person that would have been able to instantly demystify this dream, has not been with us for a long time.

Thank you for reading.

~A.V.

Senator Martin went in looking good. Her navy suit breathed power. She had put some starch on Gossage too.

Dr. Lecter sat alone in the middle of the room, in a stout oak armchair bolted to the floor. A blanket covered his straitjacket and leg restraints and concealed the fact that he was chained to the chair. But he still wore the hockey mask the kept him from biting.

Why? the Senator wondered—the idea had been to permit Dr. Lecter some dignity in an office setting. Senator Martin gave Chilton a look and turned to Gossage for papers.

Chilton went behind Dr. Lecter and, with a glance at the camera, undid the straps and removed the mask with a flourish.

“Senator Martin, meet Dr. Hannibal Lecter.”

Seeing what Dr. Chilton had done for showmanship frightened Senator Martin as much as anything that had happened since her daughter disappeared. Any confidence she might have had in Chilton’s judgment was replaced with the cold fear that he was a fool.

She’d have to wing it.

A lock of Dr. Lecter’s hair fell between his maroon eyes. He was as pale as the mask. Senator Martin and Hannibal Lecter considered each other: one extremely bright, the other not measurable by any means known to man.

The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris, 1988

:: :: ::

Who hasn’t had a fool in their lives? In their desperate search for validation, these characters will command all they can, which on occasion will include our presence. But never mind the fool: in and of himself he is inconsequential. Sure they meddle and complicate things, and make no mistake, they can be destructive, but chaos is order ineffable: in facilitating encounters of all sorts they act as the catalyst for change. Much can be gained from being drawn from time to time to places where rules—particularly ours—are being broken. There, a great experiment is carried out both on our behalf and in spite of our efforts to stop it. The mistake most often made when wandering into a fool’s reach is attempting to draw conclusions from the experience before it’s time.

As for the fool himself, not much can be said other than everyone’s fares to the chaos are charged on his account. In The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris does us a sinister, yet amusing service, delivered perhaps more satisfyingly by the film than the novel. Chilton’s ultimate fate is our guilt and pleasure, leaning to the latter as it hints at a tantalizing possibility: a particular life form may experience a great deal of injustice during its existence, but the universe, in the end, balances itself out quite nicely.

With that thought, I leave you. I’m having an old friend for dinner…

Ta,
Angel Villanueva

:: :: ::

:: :: ::

There once lived a creature in the woodland—some say a man—who lured children away from their adventures, and drowned them in a well. It would then watch, hidden amidst the trees, as the villagers gathered for the mournful task of lifting the lifeless little bodies up from the cold darkness that claimed them, into a sunlight cruel in its insistence on exposing every detail of the horror. It followed the trail of their grief to the cemetery, taking great pleasure in their rituals, in their attempts at coping with what couldn’t be coped with: the unjust passing of their innocent. For it was not the death of children that it sought, but the waking death of those who grieved them: its soul fed on the sorrows of the living.

::

Undead
You surface once again
But I have known you

You call your works the Children of the Spring
Children drowned
At the bottom of a well

Walk on
Spare me the vacuous inquiry of your stare
The treachery of your touch
The mimicry concealing rigor mortis
Of your signature approach

Spare me the tentacles of your deception
Spare me the righteousness of your reproach
The slithering dance of your tongue
Weaving a dazzling patchwork out of lies

Spare me the tedious record of your anguish
None for the better
The bait and switch
The concealed clockwork diligently ticking
Beneath the outward good of your intention

Spare me the horror
The murder of what’s good in those around you
You are a death heavier than any other
An end before the end

Cartography
The only cross I can lift up against you
The charting of a path which won’t cross yours
Is held up high

I know the blood of pain you cannot do with
Your talent is but one
To live from agony
Now let
The agony you live from
Be your own

Spare me the silent aggravation
Of witnessing your plunge

Back I say, back!

::

No longer hiding in forests, swamplands, or caves, today these creatures live in our midst, roaming the land in search for the child in us. In them lives on a predatory hunger, an urge that saw its dawn in a time long before ours. The one incantation holding sway against their lurid powers is distance.

Stay away from them, children, stay away…

~A.V.

Quiero emborrachar mi corazón
Para olvidar un loco amor
Que más que amor es un sufrir.

Y aquí vengo para eso,
A borrar antiguos besos
En los besos de otras bocas.

Si su amor fue flor de un día,
¿Por qué causa siempre es mía
esa cruel preocupación?

Quiero, por los dos, mi copa alzar
Para olvidar mi obstinación
Y más la vuelvo a recordar.

Nostalgia…
De escuchar su risa loca
Y sentir junto a mi boca
Como un fuego
Su respiración…

Angustia…
De sentirme abandonado
Y pensar que otro a su lado
Pronto, pronto
Le hablará de amor…

Hermanos
Yo no quiero rebajarme
Ni pedirle, ni llorarle
Ni decirle que no puedo más vivir.

Desde mi triste soledad veré caer las rosas muertas
De mi juventud.

Gime, bandoneón, tu tango gris
Quizás a ti te hiera igual
Algún amor sentimental.

Llora mi alma de fantoche
Sola y triste en esta noche
Noche negra y sin estrellas.

Si las copas traen consuelo,
Aquí estoy con mi desvelo
Para ahogarlo de una vez.

Quiero emborrachar al corazón
Para poder después brindar
Por los fracasos del amor.

Nostalgia…
De escuchar su risa loca
Y sentir junto a mi boca
Como un fuego
Su respiración…

Angustia…
De sentirme abandonado
Y pensar que otro a su lado
Pronto, pronto le hablará de amor…

Hermanos, yo… ¡yo no quiero rebajarme!
¡Ni pedirle, ni llorarle!
Ni decirle que no puedo más vivir…

Desde mi triste soledad veré caer las rosas muertas
De mi juventud…

Enrique Cadícamo
Argentina, 1936

1. I was 11 years old when I understood, in its full magnitude, the burdensome paradox of having no foreseeable desire to listen to others yet always having to live in their world.

2. I am sometimes afraid of the places where my mind goes—self destruction lurks in the shadows. I’ve put measures in place to keep that in check but the knots slip at times. I fear madness may be in my future.

3. Ominous as that sounds, the mind ventures in the opposite direction just as frequently. I have moments of intense illumination that leave me absolutely breathless, to the point that it is difficult to reconnect with my immediate surroundings at will. I hope and pray something like that doesn’t catch me while driving a bus full of people.

4. Life as a flatline is not something I’m interested in. That doesn’t mean I’m committed to going out on a limb to provide myself with thrills at the expense of others (though I’ve been guilty of it, and I regret that, I truly do). What it means is that I strive to experience as much of the spectrum of human existence as my time and capacity will allow.

5. Yet I wish I never had to sleep, eat, talk, have sex… I wish I could exist as a disembodied mind with the ability to see and transform matter, so I could focus on what I’m here for.

6. I have an undying love for the beauty of the desert.

7. I wish I had discovered Ayn Rand as a teenager…

8. …because I understand reality as something that exists independently from the mind. Moreover, I think ultimate truth (the structure of things) is a multi-level, multi-dimensional affair, its reach spanning far beyond our perceptual and cognitive bandwidths. Short of the Einsteins of our kind—whom are/were limited in their own way—most of us can at most aspire to deal with aspects, dimensions, fragments of the whole, which is a recipe for eternal confusion, conflict, and suffering.

9. I am happiest when I’m thinking, alone, and figure something out.

10. I have more art projects in my sketchbooks and notes than I could possibly accomplish in a lifetime.

11. I am well aware of the fact that some (sometimes relevant) people find me troublesome and contradictory, as if undefined or not-quite present. I simply have no reliable way of sharing my internal structure, and fear that even if I could they wouldn’t understand.

12. My particular brand of wicked humor has connected me (personally) with more people than anything else about me.

13. I’ve explored self-perception issues by obsessively photographing myself nude in all sorts of settings… I’ve gotten some interesting results out of that but have yet to decide what to do with the images.

14. Because I think images, in that sense, are ultimately a cop-out.

15. I’ve internally declared war on various causes, systems, and people over time, but get bored halfway through the effort and never carry it out.

16. I think of knowledge as something to be consumed.

17. My hatred for television peaks anytime I’m exposed to Latin American telegarbage.

18. I find it easiest to be friends with people I admire in some way.

19. I find it easiest to love people who share their processes of self-discovery and self-creation with me.

20. My life unfolds in 11-year cycles. I took possession of myself at 11. It was like waking up. That’s how I divide my life now: pre-11, post-11. 22 was quite the year as well. I think I know exactly what will happen at 33.

21. When I was 12 years old, my mother fell ill and could no longer take care of us. This is how I learned to cook, iron my clothes, etc. Today I can iron a dress shirt in 90 seconds (I’ve timed myself!).

22. I used to create land art as a child, using rocks, twigs, and earth. I didn’t even know there was a term for it, or that anyone would care to see it. I just wanted to put my signature in the land, to bring an element of creative order to it in some way.

23. I grew up in rural Mexico, in the Baja California desert. We lived for years without electricity or running water. My grandmother had a water pump in the patio. Shoes were something we would only wear to school. In the summer I worked picking cotton or harvesting grapes in the fields, along with other kids from my school; I remember it was grueling work under a merciless sun, but also a great deal of fun. People bartered food and services all the time. We used to get citrus fruit, cucumbers and fresh milk from nearby farms. We always grew our own chickens and often harvested wild plants to eat. Life was a day-to-day survival process that required a direct connection with the land and the people around us. For all this, I am grateful. I cannot imagine what sort of dull creature I would have become had I grown in the urban conditions that are known to me today. I cannot imagine life as a child without that great open sky, nights ablaze with stars, the riverbank, and the creatures whose secret lives I came to know. To me, civilization was a set of human dwellings that could be traversed from end to end by foot in minutes… then there were the fields, and beyond, the vast expanse and mystery of the desert. I lived in an ideal world and was immensely happy.

24. This is not a ‘woe is me’ note, I’m actually quite content today.

25. And, like Frida Kahlo once said; I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope never to return.

~A

The term urban grit, like most labels, functions as a kind of cognitive shorthand, a free admission pass to the claim of understanding what it describes. It has a faint ring of the inevitable, but it mostly conveys the notion of an evil that can be avoided through a careful routing of our experiences, should we be so fortunate.

The city resists this idea. From the loose debris unevenly coating the streets—a debris that includes human lives—to the steel and glass cages poised like great vessels in the sky, the city unfolds as a continuum, a tapestry with no clear edges. Urban grit as a realm is the result of a process, and it becomes integral to the world that cradles it. There will always be something occupying that space, and that something will always escape the boundaries of notion.

Like an interplanetary spacecraft, cutting across orbits, I traverse the city periodically and gather more data with each pass. Returning from each harvest, in the late hours of the night, I compare the readings in my memory with those captured by the lens. Rather than matching, they complement each other. A different picture emerges each time. It is like observing from the inside the ceaseless inner workings of a giant, undying organism, sprawled over the land. The city is far more than a structure: it is a living process… Its nature reveals the basic traits of the creatures that give rise to it and sustain it, and which it in turn sustains and consumes. The city is nature, in a different guise.

:: :: ::

I also find it useful to think of the city as a weather system. Here, currents meet and coalesce, sometimes becoming storms, sometimes merely dissipating in the night’s breeze. At any moment, a tenuous string may suggest itself between two entities, threading its way through the links between others.

:: :: ::

He’s following me, I think. Three blocks, four galleries, perusing some of the same artworks. Our eyes meet a few times. His are blue, intense or just cold I can’t say… No smile. Faces and voices around us become transparency and silence.

Strange alchemy.

I start to envision possible outcomes; including, why not, my lifeless remains in a body bag.

I recall a similar scenario, a lifetime ago it seems… It began in the desert , under a merciless sun, amidst a dense ocean of people. I think of that story and all that it meant.

I walk on.

:: :: ::

Photo taken November 30, 2008

The moon and companions over Orange County, California. The hazy air is the result of lingering smoke from the devastating fires of November 15th (my birthday…) which left so many without homes… It was strange to see these beautiful, distant, uncaring celestial bodies as a direct a backdrop to earthly dwellings in their atmospheric circumstance.

More to come,

~A

Today you get to visit me at work.

The work in question is a visual metaphor conveyed through simple elements: in a barren landscape, a lone organism (resembling a cactus flower) sprouts from hard-edged, geometric elements, and emits a cluster of messages into the night, which may or may not eventually be heard.

For paintings on wood, I make my own substrates. Here a solid, heavy 24″ x 48″ birch panel has been sealed, primed, and hand-sanded to a smooth egshell finish, a process taking approximately one week of continuous work to complete in dry weather. Not visible here are the mounting provisions on the back; a steel cable held by hooks double-anchored directly into the wood. The edges and rear surface are painted black. Rubber feet are placed at each corner to prevent the hard edges of the wood from scraping the wall if the painting is to hang unframed.

On this board, a detailed graphite sketch (here barely visible) and the beginnings of an acrylic underpainting are laid out.

The acrylic underpainting solidifies the location and volumetric character of the composition’s elements and provides a color field to begin building the sky on. When the acrylic layers are dry, the oil layers follow.

Depth in the dark blue sky is achieved by applying consecutive translucent layers composed of a 50/50 mixture of Prussian Blue and Ivory Black, thinned with orange rind spirits and poppyseed oil, and progressing towards transparency at the horizon line.

After several passes and their mandatory drying periods, the basic sky is arrived at.

A last, carefully blended translucent layer is applied to create the athmospheric gradient. The base color of the ground field has been applied as well. Note that the last layer covers the flower’s emissions, which is fine since their outlines are still perfectly visible through the translucent paint.

The acrylic shadows of the rocky ridge on which the dead tree/cactus flower is standing are deepened.

The star field is painted in, and right with it…

…the flower’s emissions, a cluster of shreds of silky material carried off into the night by the breeze.

The colors for the cactus flower are mixed on an oil-rubbed, plasticized masonite palette. The white surface of the palette helps test the color transparency before it is applied. For the flower petals and stem I am using premium grade, high-density pigments.

Work begins on the petals…

…and continues down the stem. The geometric elements at the base are rendered, followed by the rocky ledge. Finally, the ground field is darkened and visual texture added to it… and The Visionary comes to life, the product of endless hours spent with a 1/8″ flat brush in aching hand…

You will find a complete image of the finished work in the Paintings page. The actual painting will be on display this Saturday at my show in L.A. Don’t forget!

Saturday, March 8th, 5-9 PM
Castlewood Gallery Space
1111 South Grand Avenue, Suite 103
Los Angeles, CA 90015

Thank you for visiting me today, hope to see you at the show!

~A.V.

Welcome to my journal. After a two year hiatus, the site is up again! Things need to be adjusted and content added but it’s good to finally have things structured and functional. WordPress is a late addition, the flash menu will have to be modified to link to the blog.

It’s good to be back in my own kingdom. It’ll be nice–and a relief–to integrate all of the content I’ve scattered across websites through the years into this site. There are out there photographs and stories and poems and paintings and murals and dreams… my wandering children have been in need of a stable roof for some time.

I am currently working on two new series of paintings, the first of which will be on display at the Castlewood gallery space in downtown Los Angeles this March 8th. Information about the show is on the paintings page. The second series will be on display later in the year, perhaps as early as the April 20th exhibition at Pitzer College in Claremont, which will take place at the Grove House. More on that later.

The Visionary
Detail of underpainting
Oil on Birch Panel

Some of these paintings are surreal landscapes, the dreams and illusions, magic and myth laying the foundation for a further set of concepts at the moment only floating about in my head. Conceptualizing is fun, the endless possibility is thrilling.

I aim for a balance between evolution and intelligent design.

It’s a challenge not to give in to an artificial sense of urgency, to allow things to emerge on their own terms. But it is all somehow coming together nicely. I work on one thing while I think of another, three easels around me, the latest layer on a fourth unfinished painting drying somewhere nearby.

It’ll be a busy year.

Thank you for visiting, stay tuned.

~A