Interview with Raul Gonzalez on NAP Blog

Raul Gonzalez, Wake up Call (On My Last Nerve), 2011 | Ink and Bic pen, 45 by 65 inches acrylic. Courtesy the artist and Carroll & Sons Gallery, Boston.

An excerpt of my interview with Raul Gonzalez on the New American Paintings blog:

ADJ: How do you develop a character?
RG: When I was a kid, I would always get upset because I was in high school and the top shows wereBeverly Hills 90210 and Friends. I would look at these shows and think, “You know, there’s nothing about me or my friends that’s being represented in these shows.” I would go to a movie and the only Latino character would be a maid or a gangbanger, and it really upset me. Iit made me feel like I wasn’t a complete human being. A while ago, my brother wrote a comic book called,The Pretend Humans, and I worked on the illustrations for it.

So when I started working on this series here with the Indian heads and the buffalo and all of that, I based it on how illustrators since the 1800s and into the 1900s would draw those people who were considered to be less than human: Black people, Native Americans, Mexican-Americans. Just a simple circle, bulging eyes—that’s what those characters are. If you look at them one next to another, they’re all basically copies of each other, and that’s how I developed it.

read the whole interview here.