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site 1: Bestor Architecture
2030 Hyperion Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90027

Polaris Castillo, Artist

"utilizing google maps to triangulate the course of my desmadre (chaos) over the years"

This hand drawn illustration also uses Photoshop and Illustrator to create a digital piece that feels a little bit like a postcard. Viva Padilla's poem captures a wide range of ideas and scenes from a well-lived life. The goal is to embody her text emotionally through image, which is the challenge. The piece take bits and pieces from the text and translates them visually, as poetry can be filled with abstract metaphors. To give these metaphors a visual can make that abstraction stronger, while surrounding it with a living, breathing world. The method of making also utilizes a monochromatic look to the art, echoing old vintage comics or book covers with no real detail in color. This gives the line art a dreamlike memory based feeling, something that is washing away before our grasp. Adding too much detail to a piece can make it feel too vibrant, present. But this isn't about the present.

I'm Polaris Castillo, a Los Angeles based Mexican-American artist. I have been drawing ever since I was in my other's womb. I use a range of tools, from dry media (pencil, charcoal, pastels) to watercolor painting. I also combine pencil art with dreamlike, postcard-esque digital illustrations without much detail in color. I love the line art to be the star, with color playing the role of an emoter, but not so much a focal point. I love solid colors and big, bold negative spaces to enhance design elements. I specialize in capturing memories like plucking fish out of a pond. They are constantly in flow, some swimming deeper into a darkness too deep to explore. I'm also a filmmaker and screenwriter, and I bring the process of producing a film to my art making here. In film, our job is to re-capture memories long gone on video. To reclaim and emotion that was once there. With still visual art, we have to capture that in one image that won't move.