MONTOYA ART STUDIO
 

    I was born in Colorado and raised in New Mexico and central Illinois in my hometown of Bloomington-Normal.  My art has many influences, too many to even try and list.  I enjoy art and follow many artists working today as long with studying and finding artists in the past.  

   Perhaps many components to my work come from my fascination with detail, composition, light, color, photography, and cinematography.   My fascination with photography and record keeping and documenting my life began in high school when I took my first photography class.  Then over the years its grew.  I began buying film in bulk and taking photos of everyday things about me and my friends and family.   In college I wanted to start taking photos to use for my drawings.  I did not like the idea of using someone else's photos for my drawings and paintings.  It began with my friendship with the lovely woman whom is now my amazing wife.  What began as something fun, became almost obsessive.  I have taken since 2003, over 45,000 photos of our family, all of us together, the places we go everyday, vacations, our children and everything else in between.   For me it is about documentaion, the passing of time,  and a way to capture those moments no one wants to ever forget.   Out of the driving necessity borderline compulsion to record my life, I have developed a huge personal stock pile of images I can use for manipulating and recreating digitally into something else.  

    Currently I am exploring images through a more theatrical, cinematic perspective. I have been interested in the use of light in my images to see how this can influence the movement in each work.  I have also been playing wth the ideas of movement through mark making and how control of the materials also effect the movement and feeling in the work too.  

    When I take my photos, in the back of my mind, I have taken some because of how it looked or made me feel. I want to remember something specific about that place or moment.  I often feel like there is something hiding in my photos, I can sense it but unsure what it is. When I go back to them to start creating a reference image, I have an idea and it usually  starts with one photo in particular and then I sketch and work it out in my sketchbook and then I'll get on my computer and get to work.   I take the photos and manipulate them using Photoshop.  I will arrange and rearrange them over and over until it looks right, feels right.  Then I will sometimes make edits to color, compositions, and layer effects over and over until I find the right one, the one that speaks to me and says, that's it, that's what I want.  I have sometimes as many as 5 to 50 variations saved sometimes.  I am looking at composition of everything in the frame, within the edges of the work.  Every detail, line, shape, color, texture matters, it has to be just right.   

     For me, my work is evolving but I am not quite sure what that means or what it will look like.   I am curious about creating a reality, one that looks similar to mine but is this place where this story occurs.  I have began to develop images of this fictional world.  I am curious to see where it will lead me.  I am fascinated by how movies and tv shows use theater screens and electronic screens show other worlds, our world, people, or other people and creatures that take place in the past, present, and future.   They play on the use of  light and shadow and color palettes to further their stories.  I want to take my dreams and reality and bring them together.  So we will see where it leads us.  

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I hope you will follow along on my journey and check back in once in a while.   

 

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