MARTIN TORRES

I have always had a huge imagination and throughout my entire life my artwork has always consisted of unknown monsters and creatures in strange fantasy lands. For this project I wanted to make sure this unique artistic style I have developed over my life was portrayed. I started with several sketches with graphite pencils in my sketchbook of my characters and creatures. I’m doing this because I love drawing, it comes naturally to me, and the thought of just being able to put down a pencil on paper, and then being able to create incredible stories, exhilarates me. Once the sketches were complete, I painted them all on a large wooden board with acrylic paint. I chose this main project because I wanted to be able to express my imagination and world of creatures onto a large-scale project based on one of my favorite artists, Takashi Murakami, an artist whose techniques I aspire to learn. As a side project I also worked on small digital art pieces expanding my world of imagination.

One of the main things I have learnt about art throughout my experiences is the importance of planning an art piece before actually making it. I used to always start my art piece right away with no planning which could lead to results I was not hoping for, but now I understand how big an effect planning can have on the finished piece. When I say planning, I mean what it is I will be doing and how, as well as the meaning and purpose of the piece I am making.   

My pieces are always based upon my own artistic identity which I have practiced and developed with time, but there are always artists whose works inspired my own work. This art piece was mainly inspired by the complex mural art created by Takashi Murakami. Many of the creatures in my art piece have been inspired by the detailed, unique, one of a kind purposeful characters created by Toby Allen. The landscapes and illusion-like scenes are inspired from the many works of Dale Chihuly, even though he is a glass sculpture artist, the colours and shapes of his sculptures ignite my creativity. Lastly, my art has been inspired by the interesting and simple 2D characters designs and creatures of Jan Willem Nijman & Kitty Calis.

The biggest challenge of creating my piece occurred in the planning phase. For a while I could not figure out what to draw where, and what each creature meant. On top of this, I still was not sure what message I was trying to communicate to my audience. The greatest success of creating my piece was when one night after researching a couple artists my imagination struck gold. I had finally come up with a countless number of characters which I frantically started drawing. It’s because of that night that the characters featured in my piece are the way they are. 

I’ve always thought that one of the most important things in life is to be happy and I always think about how lucky we are to be alive and how important it is that we don’t waste this gift by being sad. This is why I hope that when people see my art, they will feel happy and glad to be alive, and that for at least a brief moment, I hope that their worries and stress are left behind. Along with this I hope for my viewers to be immersed into a world beyond our reach of fantasy and beauty and leave the real world behind them so that hopefully they might learn that we should never forget about our dreams and goals in life. This is why I named my piece: “Dreams are Never Left Behind”.