Alex Hernandez

Art is essential to our lives. We create art spontaneously in small homes, we listen to the radio, we watch television, and look at photographs online. Our lives are immersed so deeply in art that we rarely notice it when we see it. My art focuses on the moments in our lives we let slip past as we wait in traffic or on the bus.

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I work primarily on canvas and wood panels with oil paints. I begin by using a pencil to draw a grid to transfer from either a photo, a manipulated image, or a digital work. I then begin by building up a grisaille using many thin layers of paint thinned with alkyd gel medium. In this process I begin with a light-to-middle value gray and begin to establish highlights and shadows. Once I have established the values I want, I begin layering color on top using the same alkyd gel medium. Like the grisaille, I first use a light-to-middle value hue and then begin to re-establish the highlights and shadows in the piece.

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Bodies, animals and the spaces we dwell are latent with the narrative energy of living and our lives. I attempt to use the techniques of late Renaissance painters to depict in oil paintings the elements of the human form, the places we inhabit, the animals with which we inhabit those spaces, and scenes drawn from both real and the imagined.