▷ De La Cruz Aaron | Buy Original Art Online

United States • 1980

Biography

American artist Aaron De La Cruz creates works that exist somewhere between design, graffiti, and illustration. The self-taught artist creates meticulous, full of details, large-scale murals, surprisingly without any preparation. His freehand style combines several influences, including ancient Mayan art and contemporary street art. However, there are ever-present elements of the skateboard culture of Fresno, graffiti, family, and California in the late 1980s to mid 1990s. Cruz's goal throughout his career has always been to make the biggest mark on society with the bare minimum of mediums.

Aaron De La Cruz was born in 1980 in Los Angeles but grew up in Fresno, which he considers the best place to hang out as a child because there were not too many gangs. At age 7, he became interested in drawing because he wanted to be just like his older brother. The artist remembers hanging out with him on the streets as one of the biggest influences. The moment art because his calling was when they painted a Batman logo with their names inside. Later Cruz became interested in graffiti lettering and attended art classes at city college in Fresno. He made a significant income by designing and selling other people's names to them. This was the birth of his not signature style. As he broke and combined pieces of the letters, he became interested in the space between them. These first tags were the roots of what he is doing now. He graduated with BFA from California College of the Arts in Oakland/San Francisco. However, he considers himself a mostly self-taught artist.

Cruz creates intuitively, letting the piece speak for itself. As he is not doing narrative pieces, the flow of movement and negative and positive space is what is most important for the composition to be balanced. In the past, he would lose a lot of time fixing a mistake, but now the process is more spontaneous, and if a mishap happens, he takes a step back and looks at the bigger picture for the solution of how to balance the entire composition. After years of tagging, Aaron De La Cruz today rarely uses aerosol, and instead, he prefers house paint and a roller or a brush using ink. The artist's minimalistic style bridges the realms of graffiti and illustration. He gains from the idea of exclusion because just because you don't literally see it doesn't mean that it's not there.

Throughout his career, Aaron De La Cruz has painted murals worldwide and participated in numerous solo and group shows. Group shows include at MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana in San Jose, (2021) at Thinkspace Projects in Los Angeles. In 2020 the artist collaborated with DSPTCH and created fashion bandanas. All the proceeds from the sales of the masks have gone to ArtEsteem, and Border Kindness.

Aaron De La Cruz lives and works in San Francisco.

Nationality

American artists