This month we’re featuring Hernan Murno for the Capitol Hill Art League’s Mind of the Artist feature. Read his story and check out his artwork below. You can view his artwork here:

As an artist, I am interested in the different ways to manipulate a particular landscape and make it my own.  My intention is to lead the viewer through a painting in a way that, although highly abstracted, he/she could, upon close observation, discern elements that will suggest what I was trying to represent.  Some of the pieces are easily discerned, others where my original composition has elements of different pieces, are not.

Using different approaches while in the planning process, I often superimpose more than one version of the scene I intend to work on. Other times, I take the subject as is, and transform it, through, colors, texture, shape and layers of paint, into my version of it.        

These, in turn, make it more of a challenge for the viewer to deduce what the piece is about.  Based on the comments I have received from viewers, observing it, develops a sort of game for he/she to try immerse his/herself into the subject I have re-created.

Although common to many artists, through some of techniques I use, have developed ways to use the materials at my disposal in ways that makes it unique.  Take acrylic skins for example, that are frequently created with leftover palette paint; I have moved beyond the traditional ways of producing acrylic skins, to the point that, sometimes, the whole substrate becomes one giant skin on which a piece is painted.  As a whole, I believe my work is technically to the level that has allowed me to become recognized after only 10 years of working as a visual artist. 

I hope that some of you that read this, have the opportunity of seeing the complete series of Argentine landscapes abstracted at the Embassy of Argentina in September.