Those “cosmic cliffs” brought to mind a painting I recently saw at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner: “Suquamish Waters” (2018) by longtime Seattle artist Alfredo Arreguín. The large-scale work features a palette similar to the space image — sunset orange and cloudy blue — with repeated crest shapes (waves and mountains) and a hovering moon. In both images, deep skies are carbonated with multicolored stars.
The piece is part of an expansive survey, Arreguín: Painter from the New World (through Oct. 9), which showcases the artist’s skill at portraying nature, animals, mythology and the humans who inspire him in a visual manner that feels almost molecular. When I was there, I watched as two people stood in front of another of his pieces for a little while. “Oh look,” one woman said, pointing. “I hadn’t seen that before. I keep seeing new things.”
A space telescope might be helpful in viewing Arreguín’s work. The incredible depth of perspective is a result of images layered on distinct spatial planes, and the vibrancy comes from repeated patterns that recall the traditional tile work in his native Mexico.
Born in 1935 in Michoacán, Arreguín came to the U.S. to attend art school at the University of Washington, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Fine Arts in the late 1960s. (Upstairs at MONA, don’t miss the excellent show of works, sourced from the museum’s permanent collection, by some of the UW art teachers who influenced Arreguín, including Jacob Lawrence, Michael Spafford, Alden Mason, Viola Patterson and Francis Celentano.)
Arreguín has made art in Seattle ever since, refining and expanding on the technique he developed as a “pattern painter,” packing small images next to each other to create a larger whole — be that a massive “Crazy Quilt” of countless ancient faces or a recognizable portrait of Frida Kahlo.
With some 50 years of paintings on view, we see how Arreguín has time-traveled into his own past, probing for clues and inspiration as to how he arrived here. His dedicated explorations of Mayan chiefs, Mexican revolutionaries, artists, ecosystems and endangered species seem to be reaching toward another of Sagan’s famous phrases: “The cosmos is also within us.”
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July 15, 2022 at 06:59AM
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ArtSEA: NASA space photos and a Seattle artist's galaxy of work - Crosscut
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