Andres Vela

I am part of a community and generation of artists that are lost. I seek to know what my ancestral heritage is. I relate a part of my background to where my parents came from and study the culture and history of those countries, My mother is from Mexico; my father is from Guatemala. I have researched and have been influenced by the art history, culture and various styles of both countries, from Post-revolutionary Mexican Muralism to Ancient Mayan stonework. The work I do has influences of Mesoamerican, Ancient Asian cultures and religions, Contemporary Mexican and Chicano Art
What has influenced my art the most are these cultures perceptions of life and death, and spiritual understanding and interpretation of animal life. The featherwork of these cultures has influenced me, seeing their headdresses and the birds they worship like hummingbirds and the quetzal. I decided that their views on nature and process of life were broad, and found that I needed to simplify what I really liked and admired from these cultures, and that is down to their mark-making.
My series of paintings, I’ve decided to name White On Blue, are the product of that simplification. They can be non-representative or abstract. I put these figures, shapes, and white marks in a surreal blue space as if they are floating. They can embody a portrait representing a head-dress, like those of the indigenous people, or not have any language, just white marks in a blue space left open to interpretation, left for eyes to follow.
My ceramic work is derived from the same concept of mark-making but in a three-dimensional space. The drinking horn takes shape just as the paintings do, one mark at a time. Coils of clay fitting into each other to create a form that bends like a serpent into its head, a vessel that holds what the drinker has a thirst for.
Your mind and soul can die and be reborn again many times before your physical presence is gone for eternity. I’d like to show our position and transcendental perspective of how we see ourselves and change, knowing that one’s way of life is not static but continually changing as we are a part of time and space.