First published: Spring 2021
Throughout the history of the visual arts, artists who have developed their own special ways of handling their materials and creating their works often have managed, through such original methods, to evolve their own signature styles.
This tendency is as evident among art brut, outsider and other self-taught art-makers as it is among academically trained artists who produce their work in conscious dialogue with established art history and the well-known styles, techniques, and critical theories to which, as students, they are exposed.
Untitled (4), 2018, illustration marker and colour pencil on paper, 12 x 19 in. / 30.5 x 48 cm
In Los Angeles, Hugo Rocha is a 44-year-old, Mexican- American self-taught artist who has developed a manner of drawing that is marked by a bright palette and what graphic designers might refer to as a clean, hard edge.
Despite – or perhaps because of – his particular visual language’s regular use of composition-ordering grids and simple geometric shapes to depict everything from faces and their details to lamps, tables, trees, buildings and school buses, Rocha’s colourful drawings are remarkably vibrant and expressive.
Untitled (6), 2018, illustration marker and colour pencil on paper, 24 x 18 in. / 61 x 45.5 cm
This is an article extract; read the full article in Raw Vision #107
