Local Stories June 24, 2024

Rising Stars: Meet Perry Vasquez

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Perry Vasquez.

Perry Vasquez

Can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.

My name is Perry Vásquez. I am a contemporary artist and “fuzzy thinker”. I became aware of fuzzy thinking during my first week in college thanks to Jim. Jim was a friendly physics major who introduced himself in the dorm hallway, then asked me what I wanted to study. When I told him I wanted to study art, he tilted his head and replied, “Oh, you’re a fuzzy thinker, eh?” I must have looked confused, so Jim explained the difference between a “fuzzy thinker” and a “techy thinker”. A techy thinker is someone who focuses on accuracy. –––– A fuzzy thinker is ok with being out of focus. I took Jim’s remark as a compliment, and vowed to be the best fuzzy thinker I could be. Since then I’ve tried to balance my raw fuzzy thinking with doses of techy thinking.

Has it been a smooth road? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?

In my career there have been a few notable twists and turns. From the age of 15, I knew I wanted to be an artist but I lacked guidance, so I stumbled along trying various doors and testing different opportunities. Vincent Van Gogh became my first artistic hero. As a painter, he was brilliant. As a human being caught between a strict religious upbringing, and a desire to be a boundary pushing artist, he made his share of bad life choices. He was the prototypical tortured artist and canvas rebel.

Having a Protestant religious upbringing I could identify with Van Gogh’s head space. So at 20 years old I went on a pilgrimage to visit his grave in Auvers-Sur-Oise in France. Even though I loved to paint, I dropped the idea of being a painter to pursue graphic design instead. I got experience as an art director working on The Stanford Chaparral, my college’s humor magazine. It was great fun and it taught me how to work collaboratively. To this day I still enjoy working with writers.

After my junior year in college, I took an internship as a layout artist at Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing in Santa Monica. The year was 1981. Wet combined humor, art, and fashion in an original and graphically beautiful way with lots of Japanese influence. Wet’s contributors included artist Ed Ruscha, cartoonist Matt Groening, and graphic designer April Greiman. Wet was published by Leonard Koren, one of the most innovative thinkers I have had the pleasure to work with. He taught me the value of sensibility as a foundational artistic concept. He also told me, whatever I could do to make money with my art, I should do it.

Wet #25 featured an interview with composer Brian Eno in which he talked about his interest in the book Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono. The book was de Bono’s attempt to turn creative thinking into a method for problem solving. Lateral Thinking is essentially a systematic guide to non-linear thinking. I devoured that book and lateral thinking became the next level up from my basic fuzzy thinking.

Everything I learned that summer at Wet, I brought back to my duties as art director for the Chaparral. Graphic design replaced painting as my medium of choice. It became the vessel through which I would filter all the new ideas coming into my head. Later, in my thirties, I would return to painting, but my years as a graphic designer helped shape me.

What do you do… What sets you apart from others?

As a painter, I am known for my series of burning palm tree paintings. Three of my paintings were recently acquired by The Cheech Museum in Riverside, CA. Currently, I am making a variation of that series focused on cell towers disguised as palm trees. These strange “hybrid”, monopalms are everywhere throughout the West.

I discovered hybrid thinking accidentally. Hybrid thinking is the ability to combine different ways of thinking, switch between them, and coordinate them to move toward a bigger goal. The first time I experienced this thinking style was in my mid-twenties. At the time, I was interested in the influence of Bauhaus design on American fast food architecture, specifically the early McDonald’s restaurants with their golden arches. One afternoon, as I was daydreaming, a concept for a fast food restaurant in the style of Bauhaus artist Piet Mondrian popped into my head —-I called it “McMondrians” ––– what else? I set about creating designs for the architecture, packaging etc. The most challenging part was to design a package that would hold a burger, fries and a drink in a single unit. I started with a piece of construction paper, bending and folding it over and over again. It was like solving a Rubic’s cube. After many failed attempts, I finally got it. That success really boosted my confidence as a designer.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

I’d like to share a few thoughts on AI. I am currently using AI to develop a series of ocean wave paintings. In the fall of 2022, DALL-E, the first AI image generator was released. A friend sent me an article from the New York Times describing the controversy around an AI generated image that won first prize at an art show. The article intrigued me so I decided to think about the problem of AI and how to use it to think differently. I realized that most people use techy, transactional language for their prompts. The more techy your prompt, the more likely you are to get the results you want. Prompts are made of a set of qualities, attributes, and styles the AI uses a guideline to create the image.

Putting on my conceptual artist hat, I asked myself if it were possible to make the process more unpredictable, not less. Going one step further, I asked myself — Why not use fuzzy language at the level of the prompt to get a good outcome? Even better, could the whole process be turned into a Surrealist game? I eventually landed on the idea of using poetry. This seemed promising so the next question was — which poet and which poem? Without having to think much about it, I chose Charles Baudelaire’s poem Le Voyage from Les Fleurs du Mal. Baudelaire was a 19th century French symbolist poet, known for his brilliant use of language and decadent lifestyle. I grabbed the following verses from Le Voyage and plugged them into the DALL-E:

To a child who is fond of maps and engravings

The universe is the size of his immense hunger.

Ah! how vast is the world in the light of a lamp!

In memory’s eyes how small the world is!

One morning we set out, our brains aflame,

Our hearts full of resentment and bitter desires,

And we go, following the rhythm of the wave,

Lulling our infinite on the finite of the seas:

The results shocked me. It was as though DALL-E had séanced Baudelaire’s genius from the digital realm then turned it into the weirdest seascapes ever. The waves were mutated and warped with crudely rendered figures bobbing in the tide. After showing these images to surfer friends, I was told that monster waves exist around the world with names like Cyclops, Jaws and Terror Vault. Weeks later, I used the same input and got a completely different result. Sadly, I realized the images I’d generated the first time were digital unicorns, and would never appear again out of the shape-shifting river of AI data. I recalled Heraclitus’s words; “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”