Pencil is an unforgiving way to make a picture four feet across. There is no impasto to hide behind and no wet edge to lose an error in, only graphite and the number of hours you were willing to spend. Josedgardo Granados spends them. Dry Mesa is thirty-seven by forty-nine inches of pencil on paper, and Tent Rocks, at forty-nine and a half by thirty-eight, is taller than most people who stand in front of it.
Biography
Granados was born in 1980 in San Salvador, El Salvador. He took a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2002, having studied at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne the year before, and a Master of Fine Arts at the Glasgow School of Art in 2016. His work is held in the collections of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington and the Deutsche Bank Collection in New York. He showed Multiverse at Niman Fine Art here in Santa Fe in 2009.
In the collection’s words
An artist trained in San Salvador, Melbourne, Brooklyn, and Glasgow arrives at Kasha-Katuwe and draws it in pencil. That is the whole of what we find interesting about this work. The Southwest has been painted by everyone, and it takes an outsider’s discipline to look at it this slowly.
Continue exploring
- UNBROKEN, where he showed with us
- Yuki Murata, another artist who takes the land at close range
- Paintings and prints in the collection
- All artists at Webster Collection
