Featured Artist Carlos Uribe

Rich with color, pattern and energy, artist Carlos Uribe’s silkscreen art takes printmaking to a complex level. Enjoy his portfolio, and visit his website to see more.

 

 

The process of making art is a physical discipline as well as a mental journey that can be as disconcerting as it is wondrous. My attachment to these conditions and conflict is at the heart of all my work. Abstraction is my visual format and my chosen medium is silkscreen.

 

 

Trained as a printmaker and graphic artist, I have explored the territory between fine and commercial art for many decades. Never satisfied with either, I have been making images and products that crisscross this boundary constantly.

 

 

What began as a mission to do battle with the academic aloofness of “fine art” and elevate the mundane utilitarian object has led to a celebration of both and provided an endless source of inspiration.

 

 

My creation process is in large part absorption and repurposing of external information. I have always used daily life experience to formulate ideas. The challenge of abstraction has been how to tell stories and connect to “real time” experiences in both an approachable and sublime way. To this end, I have kept busy in the arts working “day jobs” in conjunction with time spent in the studio creating prints, drawings, collages and paintings.

 

 

My first print job was as a teenager, cleaning presses and learning to set type in New York. This led to pursuing a graphic techniques degree and eventually (like twenty years later) an MFA in Printmaking.

 

 

My choppy career as a printer started many years ago in California. I ran presses for commercial printers, printed yardage with long table textile printers and later, while living in New Mexico, I was a “fine art” printer for a small studio.

 

 

Concurrent with this work I was a designer/technician for many avant-garde theatrical companies in the Bay Area, ending with a four-year run touring with a circus. This led to about a decade as a carpenter, which set some very essential visual ideas in motion; ideas that I still rely on today.

 

 

Finally, I found my place as an art teacher after my other fragmented work options became unavailable or too physically painful to maintain. Teaching art (to all ages) has sustained and invigorated my own work in many amazing and useful ways.

 

 

A dear friend and author has referred to my style as “Maximalist,” a term that aptly describes both my multilayered images and themes that aspire to capture more than one meaning at once. After many years of exploring this theme, my work has an aesthetic with “serious” undertones while still being accessible on a very intuitive level.

 

 

Silkscreen is a method with dubious “high art” credentials which makes it the perfect vehicle for my ambitions. My prints are one of a kind although usually part of a family of related works all printed in the same time span. I measure the success of my work by my endless appetite to keep working in a style and method that has taken years to develop.

 

Artist Carlos Uribe invites you to follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

 

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