Las Rejas

Acrylic and oil stick on wood canvas, 18 x 24 in.

This piece began with the ironwork on old Los Angeles buildings and homes — the hand-scrolled security bars, or rejas, that line windows across the city. I grew up around them without really seeing them; they were just part of the architecture of home. Returning to that motif as an adult, I became interested in how it repeats: the same scrolled form, redrawn by hand by countless anonymous ironworkers across decades.

I approached the painting the way I might approach a screen print run — experimenting with silhouettes of the scroll and repeat convincingly across the surface, closer to Warhol's multiples than to traditional landscape or figure painting. The surface itself moves through a similar layering process: a greyscale acrylic underpainting, glazed over in oil stick, then sealed under a gloss varnish — The edges of the painting are rough to express a worn in texture you would see existing in the city.