Today we’d like to introduce you to Juan Miguel Cabrera.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I was born in Colombia and came to the United States with my parents when I was very young. After a few years living in other places, we settled in San Diego, and have lived here ever since. So even though I wasn’t born here, San Diego feels like my hometown.
I was an indoor kid growing up, and I’ve always been naturally good at drawing and started when I was very young. It’s an interest that’s stayed with me my entire life, and my parents encouraged my creativity and put me in drawing and painting classes. So it was kind of inevitable that I would end up studying art.
After high school, I studied animation briefly, then realized I didn’t want to be in the commercial art industry. So I decided to pursue the art life properly and moved to San Francisco to study painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. I graduated in 2009 with a bachelors in painting, then worked for a few years before deciding to apply for an MFA. I’m now studying to earn a graduate degree in painting and printmaking at the School of Art and Design at SDSU.
Please tell us about your art.
In my work, I’m interested in the qualities of domestic and architectural space, investigating the built environment through the process of memory, and exploring the ways that spaces can shape our subjective experience. These spaces take many forms, such as waiting rooms, break-rooms, bathrooms, kitchens, living rooms, domestic or industrial interiors; uncanny, boring spaces devoid of history or aesthetic feature, but which occupy so much of the landscape.
My preferred medium is watercolor. As a painter, I try not to be too realistic, but instead try to focus on some mundane aspect or pick up a sense memory of a specific place, and exaggerate that feeling through washes of monochromatic color. Though I work from photographs, I don’t think of my work as real places, but as representations of personal memories, collaged from images in photos, family albums, and classified ads. I want my paintings to offer a feeling of authenticity, and to connect emotionally and intuitively with a viewer.
Given everything that is going on in the world today, do you think the role of artists has changed? How do local, national or international events and issues affect your art?
Wow, that’s a really heavy question! I’m not even close to qualified to answer that…but I guess what I can say is that art, like everything else, isn’t made in a vacuum, and taking part in the world also means being constantly bombarded with information, and absorbing and interpreting that information. So, even if I don’t choose to make my work explicitly about any single issue, as a person living in the world, I am a part of my environment and my culture, and my work is naturally a product of my experience and my perspective. I think my job as an artist is to offer my perspective as truthfully as I can, and hope that what I make says something valid and honest, and helps to better the world in some small way. In that sense, I don’t think that the role of artists has changed, and art can function in many different ways; only that the definition of what art can be and what it can do has expanded.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
My work can be seen on my website at juanmiguelcabrera.com. I’m going to have a couple of pieces for the Alumni Exhibition at San Diego Mesa College, between January 28 and February 13, and I’ll have another piece for the show “Craft Revolution” at Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, which will run from February 2 to March 23. Lastly, I’ll have a ceramic piece, a collaboration with the artist Cara Golden, for “Futures Past and Present”, showing at the SDSU Downtown Gallery between February 9 through April 7.
Contact Info:
- Website: juanmiguelcabrera.com
- Email: juanmiguelcabrera2@gmail.com
Image Credit:
Personal photo by Remi Dalton
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