Birmingham, AL Painting

Born in 1973 in East Los Angeles, California, Usen Gandara began drawing at an early age. He explored various mediums over the years, including photography, printmaking and music, performing with various rock and noise groups in and around Los Angeles. In 1996 he began work in graphic design, producing book, magazines and business identities. In 2002, Usen and his wife Emily, moved from LA to New Orleans, where he turned his attention to oils and taught himself to paint.

In New Orleans, he worked primarily on discarded scraps of wood and metal found on the streets. The despair implicit in the city%u2019s trash offered an interesting point from which to begin to paint his subjects: historical figures, cultural signposts and transformative world events. The disturbing beauty that resulted was nurtured by New Orleans itself, in all its opulence and decay.

Less than two years after he began painting, Usen found a gallery to exhibit his work. With two major pieces included in the annual No Dead Artists group show, he continued to gain recognition in New Orleans until the arrival of hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

Relocating to his wife%u2019s hometown in Birmingham, Alabama, inspired work of a more personal nature, tying childhood fears and personal loss to current nuclear tensions. The personal, expressed in the use of song titles and literary quotes, is displayed alongside images of nuclear tests conducted by the United States in the 1950%u2019s and 60%u2019s. The first half of a current series is painted on pre-Katrina, New Orleans wood, while the second half uses new canvases purchased in Birmingham.

Usen%u2019s painting technique is purely intuitive. Lacking formal training, he relies on years spent exploring drawing and design, applying organic layer upon layer of oils until the images breathe on their own. The goal is not stylistic identifiability, or the promotion of a formal painting ideology, but rather the creation of his own vocabulary. The themes reflected in the resulting paintings are those of isolation, destruction, loss and the complex nature of beauty. Believing that art is everywhere and should belong to everyone, Usen, as a self-taught artist, hopes that his own creative output is testament to the fact that a world of significant work can and does exist outside of academia and the art establishment.