Art, in its varied forms, has the unique power to move people, evoke emotions and connect us all via the reminder of the human experience being a shared one. This year’s annual Artist Issue includes a lineup of five incredibly talented creatives who share this sentiment.
Though each artist’s point of view, background and medium differ from one another, what June Ainsworth, Leticia Gomez, Jimmy Peña, Alison Schuchs and Leandra Urrutia all have in common is their desire to take in the world around them and find ways to communicate life’s realities through creative expression.
Walking through Alison Schuchs’ home-turned-studio is similar to walking through an exhibition of portraiture past and present. The Scottish Highlands native’s artistic journey manifests itself in the hundreds of tiny brushstrokes to form hyper-realistic portraits of her family and the impactful people she finds along the way.
It’s fair to say Jimmy Peña’s artistic talents are intrinsic. Instead of humming along to the music on the radio, a 2-year-old Peña, sitting in the backseat of his parents’ car, painted a picture in his mind. He remembers Ritchie Valens’ “La Bamba” blaring through the speakers: “I saw this image in my mind. To me, ‘La Bamba’ wasn’t a song, it was these two elongated shapes interacting with each other — one red, one green — and they were on a checkerboard floor, dancing around.” Decades later, Peña would revisit his first memory of “art” as a concept and painted the very composition he imagined that day in the car.
Underneath the surface, Leticia “Letty” Gomez is a researcher, hyper-focused “uncreator” and dreamer. As the youngest of seven kids, Gomez’s childhood was marked by sitting around the kitchen table, doodling with pen and paper while her siblings did homework. Later, she would get in trouble for drawing on the wall with a red pen. “I just remember thinking that ‘This isn’t fair.’ So then later, when I was 16, I did a mural in my closet,” they recalled.
After a lifetime as a geologist, June Ainsworth still traces maps of images beneath what most eyes can see. In many ways, Ainsworth equally credits her aptitude for creating images and her profession in mapping the earth as each having influence over the other—a classic “chicken or the egg” conundrum. Even in still images, Ainsworth weaves her way through different approaches to the canvas, like contouring peaks and valleys on a map, with seasoned skill.
As a child sitting in the quiet awe of a church pew, Leandra Urrutia found her earliest inspirations by gazing up at faces and figures that would trace a thread throughout her life of work. Whether it was drawing or carving hands out of household objects, Urrutia recalls having a drive to create. Growing up in a Mexican American household with strong Catholic traditions, she captivated herself during Sunday masses with the numerous saints, icons and Bernini replicas found in her church.
