Artist Lecture. Diego Sanchez.

Diego Sanchez is a Colombian artist who was showing work alongside Mary Scurlock a the Page Bond Gallery on Main St. in Richmond.

Sanchez makes bold, colorful statements and he said about 7 coats of varnish on each of his paintings, because he wanted his viewers to be able to touch. Sanchez's dominating subject matter was architecture and chairs. He explained the chair paintings as part of a research project he was doing on chairs. He is curious about the political nature of a chair...the hierarchical aspects, whom is sitting higher than whom, for example.

Sanchez said that a great deal of the paintings he creates are solely intuitive. His color palettes are bold and bright and his subjects are strangely geometric. He paints the coliseum and famous architecture. He said that a lot of his friends and fans of his work will send him images of such places while they are traveling. I wonder if the rest of his images come from google image searches.

In some examples of his later work Sanchez takes some artistic liberties with the subject matter. He includes what he called "floaters." His inspiration for such was waking up early/standing up too quickly and having spots move across his vision. What the "floaters" actually look like are a combination of germs and the layered abstract circles that Chuck Close is famous for.

Sanchez remarked on his joy of using representational and nonrepresentational elements together. This was evident in his piece where he painted a large checkerboard overtop of his painting of Richmond overpasses. Again, this art appears to have been made for a specific audience, by a specific audience. It is work that I have not made myself familiar with for years and I am glad that education has taken me in the direction of contemporary. The experience of the lecture was nice, to remind me to strive work hard on the conceptual aspects of my work, so as not to become stagnant and cliche.