Artist Danny Cansino paints scenes of Chekanks communities in Los Angeles – ARTnews.com

As long as she remembers, Danny Cansino was attracting the people around her. She started doing this in elementary school, when she was drawing for other kids in her class, often with ballpoint pens. “I’ve never had access to art materials,” she said in an interview with Zoom, speaking from her home and studio in East Los Angeles. I’m going to be a hungry artist, so I’ve always been frustrated with moving in that direction.”

With that in mind, Cancino instead sought out a career as a professional makeup artist at MAC Cosmetics for nearly 10 years, working on a music video for Janet Jackson or one of Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy shows. One of her last projects as a makeup artist was a movie that was scheduled to be filmed in Doha, Qatar. Production delays resulted in her being locked up there for three months. She said, “With nothing to do, I found an art store, [bought] He paints aerosols, and he begins to paint.”

On her return, in 2013, when she was 26, Cancino attended Rio Hondo College in Whittier, California, where she enrolled in her first oil painting class. She eventually transferred to the Laguna College of Art and Design, where she would spend 12 hours a day painting to complete her BFA. Despite admiring old masters such as Rubens, Vermeer, David and Caravaggio, Cansino said she wanted her art to subvert Western canon.

“The art code is full of white males, and we rarely see human beings, period,” she said. “But when we do, they are usually in the role of slavery or inferior to the white man. And when you see female subjects in these paintings, these women are usually sexualized. I really wanted to change that look.”

Cansino’s ruined eye has already earned her a number of fans, including Mira and Don Rubelle, who have appeared in ARTnews Top 200 list – a significant achievement for Cancino, given that the pair are known for their support of artists such as Rashid Johnson, Oscar Murillo and Amoco Boavo before they achieved international fame. In an interview, Mira said she was immediately struck by Cancino’s work because of the way he balances his “classic” painting approach with his management “to evoke a kind of sensitivity to L.A. history.”

“The way you paint the ice cream truck or the street scene makes you realize that these are scenes all around us, especially when you’re exploring Los Angeles,” Mira continued. “It introduces you to a place we know exists but I don’t know much about.”

Cruise now, cry later (2022), a painting depicting five women of the Chicana family with what Cancino calls “strong feminine energies,” one such work that contains images familiar to many in Los Angeles. The public last summer, on a billboard near the corner of La Brea Street and First Street, courtesy of streetwear brand Undefeated. Reflecting on “a very strong matriarchal system in my family,” she said she painted the work with the intention of having her sitters “directly face the viewer.” This changes the narration from topic to topic. We control the situation in exchange for the viewer to look at it.”

Cansino wants to be at the forefront of the Chekanks communities on the East Side of Los Angeles because “a lot of our family’s history is here in East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights,” she said. It is an attempt to “show slices of life within Chicanx society” in the same way that everyday scenes are presented “in old Flemish or Italianate master panels.”

To create her paintings, Cansino holds photo sessions with her subjects. Most of the time, she takes pictures by herself. Then you use multiple images from the snapshot to create a composite in Photoshop. You’ll complete a full undercoat with burnt color on flat sheets of plywood, drape the highlights with a thin coat of paint, and then fill in with flesh-colored glazes until you’ve created the final image.

Drawing on her academic training, she awards tenebrism – a technique that uses contrasting light and shade to produce drama – to evoke the strength and power she sees in her sitters and her community. Sometimes these references are more direct, as in May Familia (2021), in which the artist is shown receiving a tattoo on the neck from the tattoo master who trained her. The composition is intentionally reminiscent of paintings by Caravaggio and Rembrandt.

Since receiving her MFA from the University of Southern California in 2021, Cancino has worked on a larger scale, most of her paintings being four feet by six feet. She’s kept going big, even when her studio space doesn’t allow it. One Piece had grown to such proportions that, earlier this year, before a solo show at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles, she had to finish it off in her dining room. Cansino drawing 3 to 5 street. I just couldn’t reach it.” She had to split the eight-foot-long work on two boards in order to get it in the doors of her house.

Before the official opening of the Charlie James Show, the Robles family bought 3 to 5 street. , along with everything else in the gallery – much to the chagrin of collectors and other institutions who were hoping to get a piece of Cancino’s work.

About the time that Cancino She was working on a bachelor’s degree, her cousin urged her to draw tattoos, and he and his wife became her first paintings. After graduation, she began to train in a tattoo shop. (At age 15, she had made her first tattoo, a simple wand depicting a crescent moon on a fellow band member.) She sees the tattoo as a “performance of endurance, and strength.”

Cansino’s love of tattoos is similar to her love of ink in another form: ballpoint pens, which she often uses to paint landscapes. Her biggest pen drawing so far, make your mark (2020), in the 72 hours prior to a presentation at USC. “It became a piece of this kind of endurance as I just drew this giant 12-foot topographic map as fast as I could,” she said.

The idea for the business, she explained, “came from my experience being a SoCal resident and constantly on the move and on the move.” Her daily round-trip 120 miles between Compton and lessons in Laguna Beach made her “think about how much we drive in Southern California.”

mark your mark It also included a performance element where people who attended the pre-pandemic opening were invited to touch her drawing. “Usually artists work with precious materials, or art becomes something so precious that people are not encouraged to touch,” Cancino said. “But I work with materials that are not very valuable – a pen and paper – you can find them just about anywhere. It is disposable material, but it is intended for archiving information or document archives. It is just a non-precious form.”

To leave their mark, Cancino made people eat Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, a response to the popularity of overnight food starting in the 1990s. The infamous bright red flake powder is notorious for staining anything it touches, and in the case of Cancino’s work, it enabled viewers to write messages on the piece. One visitor made an important contribution: the phrase “curse on the ice.”

“I didn’t write that,” Cancino said, “but it was fun, because a lot of people asked, ‘Are you upset? And I said, ‘No. What does that mean, to see a map of Southern California with Hot Cheetos and think of the ice? That stayed with me, because for me, that map was for everyone.’

Cansino recently started too Painting on drapes, the brightly colored blankets common in Mexico and the Southwest, and at their common border crossings. “Al Sarabi recalls my childhood and across the border and buying blankets at the border — having these blankets in our cars, on our sofas, everywhere,” she said. Due to how absorbent the material is, the images drawn appear blurry, even dreamlike.

The use of sarees, as with many of their materials, is intended to start a conversation about access to art supplies, which many viewers may take for granted. “Growing up, I couldn’t have cotton ducks and Belgian linen,” she said. “It’s a class affair. Serapes are still, like $20, and I can make three from one. That’s why this ballpoint pen is so important to me: I rarely have materials like this. And when I did, they were so precious to me.” Mine “.

A version of this article appears in the 2022 edition of ARTnews“Top 200 Collector’s Edition”, titled “Danny Cancino Paints a Picture”.