For so long as she will be able to bear in mind, Danie Cansino has been drawing folks round her. She began doing so in grade college, when she would draw different youngsters in her class, usually utilizing ballpoint pens. “I by no means had the entry to artwork supplies,” she stated in a Zoom interview, talking from her dwelling and studio in East L.A. “Being younger in a Chicano family, you’re informed should you’re going to be an artist, you’ll be a ravenous artist, so I used to be at all times discouraged from shifting in that course.”
With that in thoughts, Cansino as an alternative pursued a profession as knowledgeable make-up artist for MAC Cosmetics for almost 10 years, engaged on a Janet Jackson music video or considered one of Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy performances. One in every of her remaining tasks as a make-up artist was a movie that was to be shot in Doha, Qatar. Manufacturing delays trapped her there for 3 months. “With nothing to do,” she stated, “I discovered an artwork provide retailer, [bought] aerosol paints, and began portray.”
Upon her return, in 2013, when she was 26, Cansino enrolled in Rio Hondo School in Whittier, California, the place she took her first oil portray class. She finally transferred to Laguna School of Artwork and Design, the place she usually spent 12 hours a day portray to finish her B.F.A. Although she developed an admiration for Outdated Masters like Rubens, Vermeer, David, and Caravaggio, Cansino stated that she needs her artwork to subvert the Western canon.
“The artwork canon is simply so stuffed with white males, and we hardly ever see Brown folks, interval,” she stated. “However after we do, normally they’re in a task of servitude or one that’s inferior to the white male topic. And while you see feminine topics in these work, these ladies are normally sexualized. I actually needed to alter that gaze.”
Cansino’s subversive eye has already gained her numerous admirers, amongst them Mera and Don Rubell, who seem on the ARTnews High 200 checklist—a major feat for Cansino, on condition that the couple is thought for supporting artists like Rashid Johnson, Oscar Murillo, and Amoako Boafo earlier than they achieved world renown. In an interview, Mera stated she was instantly struck by Cansino’s work due to the best way it balances a “classical” portray method whereas managing to “carry forth a form of sensitivity towards L.A. histories.”
“The way in which she paints an ice cream truck or a avenue scene makes you notice that these are scenes which are throughout us, particularly while you discover L.A.,” Mera continued. “She introduces you to a spot we all know is there however that I don’t know a lot about.”
Cruise Now, Cry Later (2022), a portray that includes 5 Chicana ladies who’ve what Cansino described as “robust female energies,” is one such work with imagery that’s acquainted to many in L.A. It hung behind Cansino as we spoke, and a model of it was additionally made public this previous summer time, on a billboard close to the nook of La Brea Avenue and First Avenue, courtesy of streetwear model Undefeated. Reflecting on “a really robust matriarchal system in my household,” she painted the work with the intention of getting her sitters “straight confront the viewer,” she stated. “This adjustments the narrative from object to topic. We’ve management within the state of affairs versus being gazed upon by the viewer.”
Cansino needs to foreground the Chicanx communities on L.A.’s Eastside as a result of “plenty of our household historical past is right here in East L.A. and Boyle Heights,” she stated. It’s all an effort to “present the slices of life throughout the Chicanx group” in the identical method through which quotidian scenes are offered “in previous Flemish or Italian grasp work.”
To create her work, Cansino units up photograph shoots along with her topics. More often than not, she takes the pictures herself. She then makes use of a number of photos from the shoot to create a composite in Photoshop. She’ll full a full underpainting in burnt umber on flat panels of plywood, scumble in highlights with a skinny coat of paint, after which fill in with glazes for flesh tones till she creates the ultimate picture.
Drawing on her educational coaching, she prizes tenebrism—a method using contrasting gentle and shadow to provide drama—to evoke the power and energy she sees in her sitters and her group. At instances these references are much more direct, as in Mi Familia (2021), which exhibits the artist receiving a neck tattoo from the tattoo grasp who skilled her. The composition is deliberately harking back to work by Caravaggio and Rembrandt.
Since incomes an M.F.A. from the College of Southern California in 2021, Cansino has been working at a bigger scale, most of her canvases being 4 by six ft; she’s continued to work huge, even when her studio house doesn’t enable it. One piece grew to such proportions that, earlier this 12 months, forward of a solo present at L.A.’s Charlie James Gallery, she needed to end it in her eating room. Cansino painted From third to fifth St., exhibiting a number of folks lined up in entrance of an ice cream truck on a summer time night time, “actually mendacity on my stomach on the ground, portray the underside a part of the portray. I simply couldn’t attain it.” She needed to break up the eight-foot-long work throughout two panels with a purpose to match it by the doorways of her dwelling.
Earlier than the Charlie James present formally opened, the Rubells purchased From third to fifth St., together with every thing else within the exhibition—a lot to the dismay of different collectors and establishments who had been hoping to nab a chunk of Cansino’s work.
Across the time that Cansino was engaged on her bachelor’s diploma, her cousin urged her to take up tattooing, and he and his spouse turned her first canvases. After graduating, she started apprenticing in a tattoo store. (At 15, she’d made her first tattoo, a easy stick-and-poke depicting a crescent moon on a fellow marching band member.) She sees tattooing as a “efficiency of endurance, power.”
Cansino’s love for tattooing is akin to her love for ink in yet one more kind: ballpoint pens, which she usually makes use of to attract landscapes. Her largest pen drawing up to now, Make Your Mark (2020), was accomplished within the 72 hours previous a present at USC. “It turned this sort of endurance piece the place I simply banged out this large 12-foot topographical map as quick I might,” she stated.
The concept for the work “got here from my expertise being a SoCal resident and consistently shifting and commuting,” she defined. Her day by day spherical journey some 120 miles between Compton and courses in Laguna Seaside made her “think about how a lot we drive in Southern California.”
Mark Your Mark additionally included a performative ingredient through which individuals who attended the pre-pandemic opening had been invited to the touch her drawing. “Artists normally work with valuable supplies, or the artwork turns into one thing so valuable that folks aren’t inspired to the touch,” Cansino stated. “However I’m working with supplies that aren’t so valuable—ballpoint pen and paper—that yow will discover nearly wherever. It’s a disposable materials, however it’s meant to archive data or doc historical past. It’s simply non-precious in kind.”
To depart their marks, Cansino had folks eat Flamin’ Scorching Cheetos, a callback to the meals’s in a single day recognition starting within the ’90s. The chips’ notorious bright-red powder is infamous for staining something it touches, and within the case of Cansino’s work, it enabled viewers to put in writing messages on the piece. One customer made an vital contribution: the phrase fuck ice.
“I didn’t write that,” Cansino stated, “however it was fascinating, as a result of lots of people requested, ‘Are you upset?’ And I stated, ‘No.’ What does that say, to see a map of Southern California with Scorching Cheetos and to consider ice? That stayed with me, as a result of to me, this map was for everyone.”
Cansino has additionally just lately begun portray on serapes, the brightly coloured blankets which are commonplace in Mexico and the Southwest, and at their shared border crossings. “The serape factors to my childhood and crossing the border and shopping for blankets on the border—having these blankets in our automobiles, on our couches, simply all over the place,” she stated. Due to how absorbent the fabric is, the painted photos come out fuzzy, even dreamlike.
Using serapes, as with a lot of her supplies, is supposed to begin a dialog about entry to artwork provides, which many viewers could take without any consideration. “Rising up, I didn’t have entry to cotton duck and Belgian linen,” she stated. “It’s a problem that comes all the way down to class. Serapes are nonetheless, like, $20, and I could make three panels from one. That’s why that ballpoint is so vital to me: I hardly ever had supplies like that. And once I did, they had been so valuable to me.”
A model of this text seems within the 2022 version of ARTnews’s High 200 Collectors situation, below the title “Danie Cansino Paints a Image.”