Teo Gonzàlez

TEO GONZÀLEZ’s Cloudy Skies is a series of works that explores the interaction of color by deconstructing digital images of the sky and reconstructing them on a canvas or a piece of paper. Rather than doing an accurate reproduction of the original image, the objective of these works is bringing together a minimum of elements that enhance the essence of the source image.

Process:

I take a photograph of a cloudy sky -dawn, dusk, storm...- and download it to a computer. I open it in Photoshop and swatch around thirty colors out of it. Then, I create a template with a number of layers for back, middle, and foreground, with the different elements that will compose the image. I play around with the colors from the photograph, matching, contrasting, and switching them, until I settle on five of them that, because of their characteristics and the use I give them, resemble closely the original photograph. I use one of the colors for the background, another for the circles that formerly were the perimeters of the first drops, and three for dots to populate those circles. Then, I grab paint, pigments, and whatnot, and replicate those colors.

Once I have the colors I want to use, I move to the canvas. The preliminary steps have not changed with regard to the “drop” process. The canvas still has to be primed, and I do that now just as I did it in the past. I then take the color chosen for the background and apply it and then I take the color for the circles and paint them. As I mentioned earlier, the circles in the current pieces are to the current work what the first drops were to the previous one - they are placed on the surface of the canvas in the same sequence and with the same intention. When I finish painting them, the paintings look just like the drop piece would if they had been finished without applying the second drop when the first one dried: a square with a loose structure, a regular grid made out of thousands of different size circular shapes, painted on it. The differences between those circular shapes create lines that run all over the canvas up and down, side to side, but also across the structure, and even more often, snaking all around the piece.

The last part of the process is to read those lines and apply the dots of the three remaining colors. This is the most interesting and difficult part of the painting process. Every row of dots marks a line in the structure, but it also truncates many others. The success or failure of a piece consists to a great extent in making the right choices.

Teo Gonzàlez

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BIOGRAPHY


"Drawing #201" Acrylic on Paper 23.75" x 23.75" paper size 30" x 29" framed, 2005	"Lithograph #4" Lithograph #4/15 11.75" x 11.75" 17" x 17" framed, 2002	"Drawing #196" Acrylic on Paper 23.75" x 23.75" paper size 30" x 29" framed, 2005


		"Untitled #373" Acrylic on Canvas 42" x 42", 2005