Interview with artist David Gomez
David Gomez is an artist from Rogers, Arkansas. Originally from Mexico, he moved to Little Rock nearly 30 years ago and brought with him childhood memories of the art he grew up with in Mexico. His most recent paintings are a celebration of life and hope while his family navigates unimaginable hardship. More of David’s work can be found at Art Ventures in Fayetteville, Arkansas and at his website, and his friends have set up GoFundMe to help his family.
AAS: David, I know that your family is going through a difficult time. I do thank you for agreeing to this interview and I wish your family all the best.
DG: Thank you for the opportunity. It’s a real challenge for artists to continue working during a life crisis, but this one has been exceptionally challenging because it didn’t just put my wife Angie out of producing work, but it also has required me to step away from my art practice to become her caregiver. She was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in July, and we were told that she is in her last stages. We are doing in home hospice, and we are hoping that she makes it to spend our last Christmas together.
AAS: Tell me how you ended up in Rogers, Arkansas.
DG: I have been doing artwork all my life. I started in Mexico and was inspired by the graffiti that I saw throughout my hometown. We moved to Little Rock in 1997. I went to art school at UALR but ended up changing to a business major, just as I was a Junior in the art program. I felt it was a necessary change. I had seen so much struggling in the art field and did not know a successful artist who did art for a living. So, I went to work in the corporate world and a misunderstanding had me doing marketing research instead of the creative part of marketing. I thought what I was doing was going to be like Mad Men, but it turned out to be more like Moneyball.
I understood the beauty of a single number or a metric. These items could take me an entire year of work or research and development. Each number that the organizations that I worked for provided in their public records came out of the work of various groups within the organization. Everything was accounted for and was the product of meticulous work. From that perspective, I understood the depth I wanted from my work. I wanted my words, numbers and symbols that I include in my artwork to represent something deep and well researched. When I had that realization, I saw so many possibilities to my artwork using this approach, and a cathartic moment occurred. Christmas of 2018, I was at my parents’ home and I had the urge to paint. So, I got a sharpie and some copy paper and I started to create non-stop. I created about six pieces. It was at that time that I realized what I needed to do. I was going to pursue my lifelong calling of art. Almost as if it was providence, divine intervention, or cosmic design, I was laid off two weeks later and I used my severance pay to fund this calling. We moved to Rogers because I knew there was an art scene emerging. We plugged in almost immediately and I ended up having my first market show October of 2019. We knew this was our place and I knew we had found our tribe.
AAS: Where you encouraged to pursue art growing up?
DG: My family has always been proud of the art that I create but I did not have the environment that would allow me to create as often as I wanted. Except of my senior year in high school, I did not have a fixed space for me to create artwork. But my parents did play a very important role in encouraging me to create new artwork. My dad would commission small pieces for the visuals of what he would be teaching. At one point he commissioned me to do religious art for the church he pastored in Little Rock. However, my development was autodidactic. There is a piece that I did for my grandmother back when I was around 12 years old. In the illustrated dictionary that I had, there was a section dedicated to art, and it showed the title of the artwork, the artist, the year, and the medium and I remember reading “charcoal”. So, I approached my grandfather and asked him if he had any charcoal for grilling and some white paper and he gave me both. I drew an apple with the piece of grilling charcoal, and it still hangs in my grandmother’s home. I had no clue what I was doing or how it would be representative of my art trajectory.
AAS: I want to ask you first about Barrening of November. It reminds me of a tree of life. But is it actually about the passage of time and mortality?
Barrening of November, 24” x 20”, acrylic on canvas
DG: Yes, this piece was my first piece I painted after my wife’s first cancer diagnosis. She had a seizure on 2022 and had brain surgery to remove the initial tumor that was detected. It was such a heavy period. The day of her seizure I knew that my life had been changed forever. We would never go back to the life we had experienced before even if we had a positive outcome. However, I know that life could take a turn for the worse and that moment of ambivalence generated many emotions. I looked at the beauty of the life I had already experienced but I also had to be aware of the brevity of life and the impermanence of things, and people. So the piece uses the movement of the trunk and branches of the trees as it reaches into the heavens. In this piece my skies are gray and pale blue, the branches are intertwined and the tree is a calligram of heavy words. Just like I had learned that a single number in the public financials could represent hours of work and tell a very rich story of activities, salaries, people’s lives and livelihoods, a word could contain heavy context. Here the main trunk has the word “severo” in it. It is in Spanish, my native language, and it addresses the hardship that a tree must endure as the cold moves into its environment. The calling is to endure, survive, and withstand. All because it must bloom again in the spring. To me, that was a call to endure this heavy season of life.
AAS: Your paintings have strong elements of street art, which you were exposed to as a child. They are super colorful, flat and so energized. What types of art inspires you now?
DG: I’m inspired by many artists and artwork. It doesn’t always have to be visual or performance art. When I was a young boy in Mexico, I would see these men walking around my hometown in the middle of the heat selling popsicles. One of them caught my attention, he always looked well dressed in his humble attire. His shirt pressed, his hat very clean and he had a handkerchief to keep the sweat off his face. He washed his hands every time before he served you and he would not touch the money. He would have you handle that part. Total trust and concern for the customer! One day I saw him leave his home, his wife kissed him and made sure he was ready for the job. He walked away from their home and started to shout his selling call. Witnessing that I realized that art is in all that we do. How we do the things that are entrusted to us has a lot to do with how we experience and express art. I saw some art in the streets of Mexico and on the train cars and I noticed some of the graffiti was skillfully done and others weren’t as much. Some graffiti hung at the top of a bridge in a very difficult place to get to, so I understood the dedication and the risk it takes to leave your mark. I also understood that one can do artwork in a comfortable place and create pleasing images, or one can risk what is dearest in the process of creating and create work that moves us to consider deeper things. I love artists who did that, like Van Gogh, Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Diego Rivera.
“When I create out of experience, I share a part of my journey, and it allows me to unburden myself from deep emotions”
Corazon de la Mañana, 60” x 20”, acrylic on canvas
AAS: Corazon de la Mañana is a magical piece. Tell me about that piece.
DG: After painting The Barrening of November I started to focus on trees and the stories they tell. For most of our marriage, Angie and I would go on walks in the morning. They helped us to sort out our thoughts and soak in colors and inspiration. The work I created about trees delves into musings from those walks. This particular painting is based on the light piercing at sunrise and what this moment meant to us. The morning spoke to us of opportunities, of mornings yet to come. We didn’t know yet that our time would be brief. In Corazon de la Mañana, I wanted to capture the beauty in those moments. Like that magical combination of atmosphere, earth tilt, and sunrise that creates a magical moment that fades. I invite people to enjoy this moment – to live up the good things that are happening around us for as long as we can.
AAS: Afrodimuse is filled with symbolism and maybe even your own hieroglyphs? Where did such a composition come from?
Afrodimuse, 48” x 48”, acrylic on canvas
DG: This piece is part of an ambitious series that I hope I get to continue and finish. I have always been fascinated by space. My paternal grandfather and I enjoyed looking at the planets and stars and they felt like the most permanent things we know. Stars die and implode, but there is something very calming in thinking of them as outlasting humanity. For Afrodimuse, I focused on Venus, and I did research as to what humanity has attributed to the planet over our recorded history. I wanted it to be an interpretation of human achievement and a humbling reminder of how far we still have to go – to see that there is so much potential in every day of our lives. So, Afrodimuse, is a celebration of Venus and all of the meaning that we have attributed to it throughout history.
AAS: A lot of your work incorporates a repetitive rhythm of patterns. Is that what you see and feel when you start a new piece?
DG: When I was a teenager, I became fascinated with percussion instruments. My first drum instrument was an empty bucket and a sawed-off old broom stick that I turned into drumsticks. I was determined to learn, but I could not afford a drum set and our home in Mexico was too small to have one. So, I came up with this idea from watching a PBS show of a bucket drummer in NYC. When we moved to the US, I picked up a traditional drum set and I have played for many years. I feel like both the art and music go hand by hand and I like to incorporate some of the rhythm and colors that I see in music. When I paint, I let music lead some of the parts where I depend on improvisation. As a drummer, this was a big part of my playing. I am into the improvisational aspect of music and that has absolutely transferred to my painting.
AAS: Cosmopolis Nocturne is a fantastical landscape of color and shape. Tell me about that piece.
Cosmopolis Nocturne, 24” x 30”, acrylic on canvas
DG: When I painted Cosmopolis Nocturne I had been painting full-time for about two years. That was the moment that my style started to emerge, and my lines became more pronounced. I had been invited to do a group show in NYC and I was so excited that I felt like I had to create a piece that embodied what I imagined NYC to be like. With this piece I was looking at the contrast of dark and light of an evening in NYC. My experience reinforced the feel of this piece when we visited the city for the show I was in. This painting signifies one of my most treasured memories.
AAS: One of my favorite paintings of yours is La Galletera. It really embodies the elements one would associate with your work but is it more literal – and crazy fun! Was that a commissioned piece?
La Galletera, 60” x 72”, acrylic on canvas
DG: This piece is a moment of reflection about one of my first jobs as a teenager. One summer I had a job at a cookie factory. I learned a lot of valuable life lessons and I acquired my work ethic there. This piece is set up almost like a comic strip with a focus on the two most prominent objects for me. The industrial size mixer and the dough distribution belt. Everything else is peripheral to these two objects, but I wanted to share the role each part of the process has in the end product. Our cognition captures only a portion of the whole thing but anything that is part of our bubble of existence comes from another bubble. We are only aware of what we have in front of us but when we step out of our comfort zone, when we step out of what we are familiar with, we can see how interconnected everything else is. During my time there, I saw many pallets of cookies going to places like China and Europe, all from a little factory in Little Rock. That to me was fascinating.
It was not a commission painting, but because the work captured so much of food processing and its cultural implications, Brightwater, the culinary school in Bentonville wanted for it to be part of the artwork they show their students, and it is now part of their permanent collection. I have done some commissions for other organizations like the Amazeum and one of my pieces is part of their permanent collection (Principia Crescendum).
AAS: David, how has painting and and being creative helped you navigate through the ups and downs of life?
DG: For me, art is communication. I write and I paint. I paint picture with words, literally and figuratively. So, as I process the heavy situations in life, I find myself needing to express these through my work. It is so important to let things go from the heart onto the canvas or onto paper. I feel like the process allows me to let other things in. When I create out of experience, I share a part of my journey, and it allows me to unburden myself from deep emotions. As the viewer looks and ponders the work that I am sharing, we participate in a community. They can accept or reject the work, or they can at least acknowledge it. In return, I can feel seen and acknowledged. Even if we don’t agree, I feel heard – and that is a very powerful process for healing. I feel like my work now has more depth as I am sharing more about the pain we all go through and the similar journeys shared with many of my collectors.
