Gary Cruz

Thumbnail of Featured Art: Blue Love, archival pigment print, 18" x 18", 2018-2026

Artist Statement: I start with photographs—plants, landscapes, architecture, everyday places. Then I transform them digitally, so they end up somewhere between photography and painting. I keep coming back to the same image, sometimes for a long time. Colors shift, forms blur, abstraction takes over, until the original is completely transformed—you'd never recognize where it started. But something of it survives anyway: the spirit, the energy, the color and light of that first photograph. Not the image itself, but what it felt like. I'm not documenting a place. The new image invites a different kind of looking, one where emotion takes over from observation and familiar things become open to whatever the viewer brings to them.