Bay area painter Jose Arenas recently completed a mural commission in his hometown neighborhood of downtown San Jose, now the up and coming art district of the United States’ 10th largest city. Arenas is art faculty at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California; a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute and UC Davis, where he completed his MFA in 2000. He is currently represented by Hang Gallery in San Francisco. This interview was conducted at the completion of the San Jose mural, and will be included in a monograph of Arenas’ work to be published in early 2010 by Hunger Button Books.
Whirligig: You’ve just completed a mural in downtown San Jose that is 16 feet high by 108 feet long. How does that feel?
José: It feels pretty good especially now that it’s done. I now have time to look back and reflect on what happened in the last two months. I was really excited to work with other people. I usually don’t get that when working in the studio, in there it’s mostly alone time. So I got to work with a great team for about six weeks and at the end of the project we held an unveiling party. It was a really good way to give thanks to all of them for being involved in such a big project.
Whirligig: Talk about your process in both developing the imagery and in painting the mural.
José: The call for entries involved submitting a packet that included one’s work, a resume, statement, and letter of intent. The statement and letter were instrumental in articulating my own history and connection to San Jose. After I was accepted, there were two designs that were expected of me within about three weeks. I wrote in the statement that I was pretty much of a downtown (San Jose) kid for most of my childhood years. So I went back to that statement and remembered what drew me to that area. I guess I was doing a bit of reminiscing because I was thinking back to when I was a kid.
When I started working on the design I used Photoshop, which for me was a relatively new way to put my ideas together. Typically the way I worked before was a collage cut and paste method where I had a blank sheet of paper and I would move images around to see how they formed relationships. What I ended up doing this time was cutting and pasting various elements from very specific sources. If I had an idea of a flower, I searched it out or I would scan it from a variety of book sources and then manipulate it in Photoshop so that it changed, and then I would incorporate it into the larger idea that I was working on. So it was a bit of a new way for me to work.