ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Diego Herrera was born in Mexico City in 1972 where he lived in a working class neighborhood until the age of twelve years old. After the 1985 devastating earthquake the Herrera family moved to a small village in the State of Puebla. After completing secondary school, like many other young Mexicans, Diego moved to the USA. Arriving in the city of Chicago the spring of 1990.
In Chicago Diego worked as a dishwasher, and later as a busboy. In 2000 Mr. Herrera went back to school and got his GED from Truman College. In 2001 Diego began taking classes at City College of San Francisco in California where he earned his Associate of Arts degree. In 2009 Diego got accepted to University of Maryland in the Anthropology department achieving a Bachelor’s of Arts in Cultural Anthropology.
Ever since he was a young boy Mr. Herrera was interested in art, he painted and wrote poetry in his free time. Living in Chicago, Diego enrolled in an art curse by mail, and thought himself the essential elements of drawing and painting. After Graduating from UMD. MR. Herrera began to dedicate more of his free time to develop his unique technique, and currently Mr. Herrera continues to work towards developing a more personal stile of painting that reflect his own personal experience as an direct descendent of Nahuatl people now living in the United States.
In March 4 of 2015 Diego made his art public for the fist time by displaying at the RAW artists DC for 3 consecutive years. Mr. Herrera also showed his work at University of Maryland College Park with a group of artist called The Latin American Art Leage. Currently a group of Diego's paintings are on display at Mundo Verde Public Charter School Calle Ocho.
Statement
DIEGO HERRERA
ARTIST STATEMENT
Over the years my art has evolved in ways I never imagine when I first started painting. I expect that my art would continue to mature in the future, but I also know that my own individual perspective will continue to inform my paintings. I see my paintings as a reflection of my inner landscape, informed by my experience as: a Mexican American, as a Nahuatl Indigenous Latino, as a man of color, as a member of a diaspora.
My early work concentrated on the subconscious nature of art as I explored through abstract painting the issues that are not always obvious to the artist. I did not plan my pieces but allow the mood of the moment to dominate. The result was a series of geometric acrylic painting saturated in bright colors, and then I attempted to explain their uniformity, I came to the conclusion that these geometric figures represented my own need to classify the world in order to understand it. As a Mexican immigrant this world was largely unknown, and my place in it seemed at times dubious, as a young man I struggle to fit in, but I always found a refuge in my canvases.
More recently I have worked with figurative painting using oils. The process is different, but the result is a continuation of what I learned in previous work. I continue to utilize my art as my way to connect to larger world. Time after time I return to the exercise of self-portraiture as a means to place myself in the structure of society. I as the man of color. Therefore, when I paint myself I do it with primary colors overlaid by secondary colors, and by primary colors again. Sometimes yellow dominates, some times red fights for its rightful place, but in the end all colors inhabit the canvas and create something new; the new American man, desended from the original people of this land.
Currently I find myself experimenting with landscapes. The sky is the limit, and water holds a strong fascination for me. In my paintings the Sky and water are at times in unison, but others, they seem at war with each other. Color in these paintings is applied in multiple thin layers so that the layers underneath are always visible. I see landscapes as my need to create connections between my environment, as an attempt to become one with it. My past informs my art; the colors of my Mexican heritage find refuge in the Californian Coast. Members of diaspora always feel disconnected in spite of being successful at assimilation. My art explores all this because it is conceived in the restless mind of an immigrant.
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