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Devon Almarinez hails from the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area. His passion for art started as a teenager and continued after graduating from the University of San Francisco. He brought his creative skills on the road traveling around the US with celebrities and entrepreneurs creating custom artwork for them in multiple formats from tattoos and merchandise to street art. His work has been featured in magazines, TV shows and public spaces across the US and internationally. While working and developing celebrity branding and design, he realized his passion for expression through mixed-media urban contemporary works of popular culture, would be an exciting future in art.

 

Urban art, in its many expressive forms, has become inextricably linked with the world of music and Hollywood entertainment. Bring the reverberating echoes of contemporary urban art of the street into the studio, and paintings erupt that are highly energetic and theatrically charged with personality.

 

Devon ever confident of his background in graphic design, creates portraits with a collaged career summarization, all while conveying his reverence for celebrity icons. As an intuitive creative, this self-taught painter, aims to document their societal contributions, and create an homage to the icon while inciting the audience to explore and learn more about them. Maintaining the integrity of the person is paramount to Devon’s work as he displays their all too often forgotten biographical highlights on canvas. Pasted fragments of career attributes along with a medley of photographs, create a condensed conversational composition of a person who achieved great cultural accomplishments.

 

During his exhaustive research Devon builds a close relationship with each character, symbolic in his intimate aesthetic of conveying the complexities of the subject’s persona with detailed visual art. The artists’ treatment of these memorable stars makes them captivating and accessible to the viewer, exposing them in layers of ephemeral biographical graffiti, Devon’s notes of admiration. A confidently arranged, interactive graphic medley portrays the personification of celebrity in character, viewers will discover something new each time they contemplate this mélange of memorabilia.

 

Devon’s portraits, framed in a festive gathering of graffiti and marks, create a high-keyed atmosphere reminiscent of a life in the spotlight. The artist brings to bear a myriad of learned studio techniques; his unique design influenced style combines splatter painting, screen-printing, squeegee art, and graphic design into “organized chaos,” much like the chaos of our technological world.

 

A graphic fluidity and spontaneity develops throughout his art, they are busy yet balanced, there is no set formula, but rather a cultivated variation to the incorporation of appropriated ephemera surrounding the iconic portrait. The graffitiesque excerpts, collaged in the background delivers a message conveying the complexities of the subject and their career. How beautifully informative each tableau is, the collaged, textured and splattered biography of a luminary invites discovery.

 

One can appreciate Devon’s many forms of creativity on canvas, his noted individualism and the unique theatrically of his work. Where Devon’s work greatly succeeds is in his openness, allowing the viewer’s emotional connection for the subject to influence the interpretation of the work.