Urban Landscape Paintings by Marc Trujillo

American painter Marc Trujillo depicts places in his paintings that are omnipresent in American urban and suburban landscapes such as gas stations, shopping malls, big chain stores, and restaurants. Trujillo paints locations that are non-destinations, particularly North American kinds of nowhere, at once ubiquitous and yet largely unseen.

“Two hundred yards of polished concrete or linoleum gives me a little chill”, says Trujillo. “I’m captivated by the middle ground, the purgatory of the world we’ve made and share as North Americans, in a way that makes me want to paint it.”

Mr. Trujillo’s paintings are fundamentally synthetic in nature, and represent not only the experience of direct observation, but also an appreciation for and awareness of paintings and painters of the past. The finished work is the sum total of a series of continual explorations, refinements and distillations, all of which begin with drawing and preparatory sketches.

Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1966, and currently residing in Los Angeles, Mr. Trujillo teaches at Santa Monica College. He received his B.A. in 1991 from the University of Texas at Austin and his M.F.A. in 1994 from the Yale University School of Art, where he received the Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Fund Prize as well as the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Trust Fellowship. In 2001, Mr. Trujillo received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and in 2008 he received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Artist’s website

via Artistaday and Gf.org