Jake Trujillo- Paintings

Jake Trujillo is an artist and musician born, raised, and based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico. His visual art is deeply tied to his own experiences and emotional connection to Northern New Mexico and the Desert Southwest. The grandson of a painter, Trujillo grew up around the sights and smells of oil paint and it continues to be the predominant medium in his painting practice.

In recent years he has incorporated fluorescent acrylic paint as a backdrop, seeking to convey the unmistakable vibrance of the desert sky that is so viscerally felt while experiencing it.

Taking inspiration from 19th Century Tonalist and Hudson River School painters, as well as the traditions of painting the American West, Trujillo employs the techniques of Expressionist Tonalism in his work. Featuring oils applied thin, an emphasis on the depiction of atmosphere, the abstraction of natural forms, and an aim to portray an arrangement of terrain, light, and nature in a way which conveys the mood and sensation of observing an instant rather than explicit depiction of an area. All of these qualities are front and center in his work.

"I wish for my paintings to serve as a resonance chamber for the experiences and emotions of the viewer. Landscape painting as the observation of an instant, to me goes as far as the instant the piece itself is observed, as we each bring to that interaction our own experiences and memories of these areas and these moments in time."