Art Feature: 9

9
by Ramiro Davaro-Comas

Ramiro Davaro-Comas  is an artist and illustrator from Buenos Aires, Argentina, currently living in Brooklyn NY. His work has an underlying narrative that reaches out to its viewers and invites them to create their own story line to the images they are seeing. It is colorful, powerful and thought provoking. Davaro-Comas’ work is influenced by his life travels, the urban art movement, skateboarding culture and the “street life.” His work ranges from small illustrations to large canvases to immense outdoor public works. He has had his work published though different channels and his recent illustrative collaborations with Carinthia Parks of Vermont have been featured in Transworld Snowboarder magazine.

It’s great to have the opportunity to showcase some of your work.  It’s dark yet inviting, carnival-esque and thoughtful.  Each painting captures a moment that feels equal parts organic and absurd.  How do you characterize your work?  What’s your greatest motivation when you’re working?  My work is very illustrative; yet I pull so many different ideas and elements from so many different sources that it is difficult for me to categorize. Lately, thematically, my work has been of a fantastical nature. I have been creating surrealistic worlds where characters interact with dreamlike landscapes filled with sharp edged mountains, colorful pyramids, and a variety of strange elements included throughout the paintings. I tend to work within my own vocabulary of characters and visual cues that have been building throughout the years.

You’ve released a number of books and zines, most recently Imaginationland (2013) and Planet of the Crepes (2014).   What did you set out to achieve with each of these projects?  Does the creative process differ when you’re approaching something like a 40-page book of illustrations rather than a single painting?   Each one of my zines or books has a different theme, all with an underlying goal of entertainment. With Planet of the Crepes, I wanted to collaborate with my long time friend Robert Ackley. He came to visit me while I was in Berlin for s solo show, and we created Planet of the Crepes one day siting outside a creperie. We wanted to create a story that not only read well and was comical, but that had just as comical illustrations to go with it. Crepes is one of my favorite projects that I have worked on in a while. Bert’s writing is unbelievably funny and dry. With Imaginationland, things were different. Imaginationland is a collection of some of the work I produced while I was traveling through Europe and the US for a year. It is a curated version of my past years work, and it was published by a gallery in Berlin called IDRAWALOT.

Can you describe your creative process, or any habits you picked up over the course of your career that have helped you hone your craft? Illustrate all day. Keep drawing everything you see and get yourself out of your element. My creative process, whether it is for a painting or a mural, is usually the same. I will sketch something out or have some reference material that I will use, then I look at the medium. I will begin to paint as if it was just a piece of paper and I was going to draw on it. No matter what the size of my medium in front of me, I will just look at it like a piece of paper. This really helps me visualize large work and scale my painting from small canvases to large walls.

If you could turn our readers on to one artist, who would it be? Right now it would be Pixel Pancho, or Os Gemeos.  Killing it. If you don’t know who these guys are, check ’em out.

What’s your favorite book, or author? My favorite book lately would be Fahrenheit 451, but my favorite author would be Hunter S. Thompson.

Thanks again for taking some time to talk to us.  Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers? Thanks for inviting me! I have a new illustrative children’s book coming out soon called Manimal Friends. The book teaches kids the proper names of groups of animals. So I bet you didn’t know that a group of giraffes is called a tower, or that a group of wombats is a wisdom.  It will be out this spring, hopefully by April. Keep checking www.trucostudios.com for more info!

Cisco Covino is a writer and graphic artist and aesthetic scientist.  He received his MFA in fiction from Fairfield University and currently teaches at Johnson & Wales University.  His work has appeared in such publications as Now What?, Cracked.com, and Old Time Family Baseball.  He can usually be found riding his bike through the sweet absurdity of Boston, MA.

**Cisco also serves as Spry‘s Graphic Designer.