Azul Nogueron

Year of birth: 1995.
Where do you live: Chicago.
Your education: Masters in Studio Art at Maryland Institute College of Art.
Describe your art in three words: Passionate, Nostalgic, Profound.
Your discipline: Painting.
Website | Instagram

Your art reflects both romance and grief. How do you balance these two contrasting emotions in your creative process?

For me, you can experience grief with love. I often reminisce about past loved ones that taught me lessons about love and it helped me become the person I am today. The way I lead with love is a reflection of who I used to be and how much I’ve grown since then. Feeling grief when it comes to romance is something so embedded in who I am and handling those emotions personally has never felt still. Everything feels intertwined but at the same time, fireworks exploding internally. I try to demonstrate that in my work as best as I can. When creating work about love, there are elements of a previous life I used to live in the paintings: they may be subtle from the way the people in my paintings look away or they can be more confrontational like my use of color to evoke emotion. Experimenting with surrealism in my work, I try to balance both emotions by creating a dynamic composition that’s chaotic and passionate but also deep in feeling. I try to mimic that feeling of everything being intertwined within each other to the best of my abilities.

How does your use of vivid colors contribute to the emotional narratives within your portraits?

Color is a form of language for me. As someone who experiences synesthesia, I correlate colors with memories and it triggers feelings for me. I am someone who feels things intensely so the use of color is very important in my work. I am intentional to use hues that replicate the feeling I am experiencing in the work and often those are very saturated colors. It doesn’t make sense for me to mute colors because the feelings I have are strong and passionate. In some cases, having neutral tones helps balance the painting from an explosion of color, but for the most part, I want my works to be vibrant and remind people of what it’s like to feel so deeply. I feel like my work provides a packed punch of emotions through the use of vivid colors and helps push the narrative of unconditional love, community, grief, and intimacy.

Azul Nogueron | Fotos y Recuerdos

What role does your cultural heritage play in your artistic expression and themes?

For me, it makes sense I make work the way I do because I was very influenced by other Latino artists like María Izquierdo, Frida Kahlo, Pepón Osorio, and more! Reading about these artists allowed me to paint my truth and also link my heritage into the work. While it’s not outwardly about my culture, you can see cultural references in the paintings. Also, growing up in a Mexican household, I was surrounded by colorful decorative items so you can see how it also influenced my work. I’m fascinated by all the beautiful artisan work that local Mexican artists do and it allowed me to experiment with different methods of painting.

Your pieces explore the concept of acceptance. How has this theme evolved in your work over time?

Over time, I’ve allowed myself to make work about self-love, a concept that I strayed away from because I wasn’t mentally in that space for a lot of my life. When I first started my journey with acceptance, I didn’t necessarily have positive feelings in my paintings. I focused more on the anxiety of accepting myself in a world that often told me I wasn’t good enough. However, certain experiences allowed me to heal from that anxiety and become more demanding for acceptance. In my painting “fat bodies,” it shows a combination of larger bodies in different positions, and it took me about four years to complete. I was angry for a long time while completing that piece because I felt like I needed to demand space for me to exist when I should have already had it in society. So slowly, I worked on the piece and helped work through feelings I was having about my own body. That painting was a thought that said “We are here to take up space and be seen as beautiful.” As the journey continues, I still try to make work that focuses on the concept of acceptance. It is a feeling that is a constant work in progress but I have found myself surrounded by external affirmations from my friends, family, and partner. This love that surrounds me helps push me to create more work that is a reflection of their ongoing support, thus helping me accept myself more. So, future works might look different from my anxiety-induced paintings. There may be softer tones used to create that fuzzy feeling of being truly seen and accepted. For now, though, acceptance in my work is just surrounding myself with loved ones.

Azul Nogueron | Te Lo Pido Porfavor

What role do emotions like fear and curiosity play in shaping the narratives within your paintings?

Curiosity is prominent in my work and works in tandem with fear. I often question my actions and emotions when making work about romance and grief. What does romance look like for someone who’s had terrible heartache? What anxieties come up when it comes to showing love to my community? Those questions help me understand more what it means to lead with love as someone who has a lot of grief. My curiosity about my emotions helps me understand what I want to do next in my painting. It chooses the composition, the color, and the narrative I am trying to convey. I try to get to the root and paint those emotions instead despite my initial fears. You can see that in my painting “Te Lo Pido Porfavor,” which is a piece about making a situation bigger than it actually is. What I was feeling when making that piece was anger: feeling as if I wasn’t seen or heard. Pushing on that fear that I was being misunderstood helped me figure out the composition for that piece as well as colors that spoke to the delusion I was feeling. Allowing myself to question my emotions and feel that fear is vital for my art practice. It allows me to create the narrative for the work and to experiment with how I want the painting to look.

How do you feel your work contributes to broader conversations about the intersection of art, religion, and queerness?

My work is a vessel for conversations to be made about religion, queer identity, and art. Everything is intertwined within itself, in a way. To talk about one’s art, you talk about identity and what everything you experienced led to that moment. There are so many queer people with religious trauma and complex feelings of self-worth that express that through the form of art. Whether that be visual art, writing, music, or other forms, queer people are begging to be heard. We are here and always have been, and nothing can stop us from being present.

Azul Nogueron | Guilty Pleasure

What does your typical creative process look like, from initial concept to finished piece?

To get my initial concept, I reflect on my past and how much things affected me. When reflecting, I ask myself how much it impacted my present and if these emotions still linger. I question my emotions I was experiencing at the time and then sketch an idea of what I want my narrative to be. However, the sketch is a very loose idea of what I want the initial piece to be because usually as I start painting my work, my memory of the said situation becomes clearer and it influences my choices. Sometimes I have a sketch of a painting and by the time it’s finished, it looks completely different from what I initially thought it would be. As I am creating the work, I journal about my experience and highlight emotions that come up for me. Different emotions have different colors, and I do my best to choose the best combination of colors to invoke those emotions. Also, I experiment with composition to see if there are more ways to push the narrative of the work while remaining true to the situation. The creation of a painting requires a lot of reflecting and experimentation, which is pretty fun for me. I often find myself saying, “Am I doing the painting justice?” and that only encourages me to get more complex about the piece.