From the Sketchbook: Image and Interview with Gabriel Pons
- Gabriel Pons
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
We recently traded notes on influence and inspiration with muralist, painter, and collagist Gabriel Pons, whose PONSHOP gallery is a Caroline Street fixture in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Below you will find a sampling of his mixed media art work alongside our interview.
L&T: You often paint murals for local communities. How do these communities—or more broadly, Fredericksburg, Virginia—inspire your work?
Pons: For every mural project, I aspire to get to the essence of a site. By that I mean, creating a concept that speaks to the spirit of the place, organization, or institution. In order to achieve that, I have to do some homework and meet with community members or work with faculty to have them provide to me information. In some respects, my process starts with the activity of collage in that I begin pulling sources from a wide spectrum so that I can formulate an idea. The inspiration usually comes when I strike upon a correlation between the place, its history, the people involved or participating and a loftier idea.
L&T: How does creating art in public spaces affect your views on ownership? Should public art be treated differently from private commissions?
Pons: Art in the public realm is admittedly a different animal from private commissioned work—both in scope, scale and how it is conceived and executed. For instance, for a public mural I create the compositional “blueprint” meaning the design is laid out and colors are assigned to each shape, but I may not be the one to do the painting or making the micro-decisions in certain design situations. Public murals, because of their scale, have to become more communal and collaborative to push them forward to completion. I become a project manager that facilitates everyone with a brush in hand and make sure that it’s executed properly, and that participants are safe and engaged. As a result, that sense of ownership becomes broader and to the benefit of the mural, now a larger group of the community take ownership in the effort and it becomes not an artwork by a single artist, but claimed by a collective. Private Commissions, in this case I’m thinking of canvases and even murals executed in homes, become a bit more intimate and require more of personal dialogue with the client to extract that kernel of inspiration that will guide the artwork. The one aspect that both private and public commissioned artwork share is that I always strive to work towards creating a design concept that guides that life of the artwork. Once a client is convinced of the intention of the work (even if the design is still schematic), I get more confident pursuing the finished product.
L&T: Your gallery is called the PONSHOP, playing on something that is inherently borrowed/redistributed. You’ve also recently opened a creative cafe at your studio, where guided projects involve replication and coloring previous works. What have these sessions taught you? In what ways do they inform your own practice?
Pons: The idea of the Creative Cafe is to provide a casual environment for art-making that removes the pressures of initiating a project (the blank canvas syndrome) and allows guests to enjoy a refreshment and get out of their head—and even comfort zone. So far, we found that guests benefit from the communal aspect of the activity— spending some time with a friend that is both social and creative. I’ve been drawing a parallel between the Creative Cafe and a Skateboard Park—people can participate at their own skill level and get inspired by what others are doing around them. Both personally and professionally, we’ve always been drawn to things that merge recreation and creativity together to essentially have fun.
L&T: What role do you see [Allegory]—i.e. lady justice, trojan horse, queen of hearts—playing in your work?
Pons: In terms of my process, many times I’ll start with a subject (or object) and then do research to figure out what about that content interests me. For instance, with the justice figure “Fate and Fortune”, I created that piece as a commentary on how our (then and now) political climate was putting democratic tenants under siege, but inherently I also wanted to learn more about how the statue originated as an amalgam of Roman and Greek imagery. Many of my pieces have to do with working in a design series. The Queen of Hearts was the second in a series of playing cards that I sought to approach the graphic treatment with my own style and influence. From my background in Architecture, I was trained to work in variation and explore different ways of producing a design “solution”. In this case it’s a way for me to both study an existing design series and figure out how I can achieve something new using my own parameters.
L&T: Was there a moment or a particular piece where your aesthetic really came into focus?
Pons: I did a series of pieces called “Landscape Triptych 1-3” where I took fashion images and created an abstracted world around them. These were larger pieces than a typical sketchbook (30”x20”) and forced me to really formalize them into “Fine Art” pieces— meaning that I took the measures to mat and frame them behind glass.
L&T: When in your professional career did you start consciously borrowing elements from other artists?
Pons: I’ve always been pulling text and imagery from my environment one way or another. Even as a kid, I made collages from skateboard magazines of all the most intriguing artwork/graphics or chopped up Rolling Stone magazines and CD Boxes to make a montage of my favorite bands in my high school locker. Candidly, when I started endeavoring in collage and painting, being a “professional” was not in the cards, however when we were living in New York City and I had access to a lot of discarded fashion magazines, I started to build a cache of images to modify. My intention is not to lift an image and simply displace it into my artwork, but find ways of altering it, manipulating and re-contextualizing it so that it becomes something different. Working in my sketchbook and reverting to repeating a song lyric on the page is more out of improvisation fueled by a habit that feels almost like a diary. Many times I’ll incorporate text and lyrics because they are the closest way to expressing how I feel at the time.
L&T Were you thinking this way from the start?
Pons: For me, pulling and collecting collage imagery, cutting figures and shapes out was a way of starting a working session. In my sketchbooks, I would treat each 2-page layout as a different vignette or film still and would mix and match elements intuitively until a composition started to gain interest.
L&T: Do you encounter any difficulties translating influence across creative mediums? Are some of the mediums you work with (i.e. collage) more or less receptive to creative borrowing?
Pons: I’ve found it challenging to create large-scale pieces that are solely made with original collage pieces. The nuance of collage from books and magazines is that there’s a certain quality to the original print and paper that once you try to replicate at a larger scale (through large format color copy) it becomes something else—a bit more of a synthetic. For me collaging at a small scale (ie: sketchbook size) provides me with a better bandwidth of imagery as well as finding interesting nuances in the small scale. On the other hand, I have taken imagery like the justice figure and recreated it as a digital vector file that then becomes a 3-foot tall stencil that can be applied on canvas and on city walls. In fact, I enjoy that translation from taking a found image and redrawing it— boiling down its form—to a stencil that has a life of its own.
L&T: What authors or artists do you find yourself coming back to for inspiration?
Pons: Whenever I feel inspirationally “stuck,” I’ll pull from my library some of my favorite comic books growing up: Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, the artwork of Bill Sienkiewcz. But I’ll also browse through stacks of National Geographic, my history of art and architecture books or go to the library and just roam the stacks. The Beautiful Losers book and “Low Brow” art speaks to me the most—artists that I looked up to in the early 90’s: Barry McGee, Doze Green, Ed Templeton, and Swoon. Sometimes I’ll resort to my collection of movie documentaries to get motivated: The Beastie Boys Movie (and Book) or the A Tribe Called Quest documentary Beats, Rhymes and Life remind me about why I love art and music and how so many of my heroes in that world worked hard to stay true to their art.
L&T: Speaking of juxtaposition, your work often blends the written word with visual media. What comes first? What factors come into play when balancing these two elements?
Pons: Usually some kind of visual cue starts the process and I begin by doing studies on a figure or object. Coincidental with that, I’ll either start collaging material on the canvas as a background or start to write related text on the canvas. It’s a bit of an idiosyncratic process sometimes because I’m still searching for both a conceptual angle as well as a compositional layout, but making moves on the canvas allows me to keep moving forward. Inherently there’s some kind of correlation—even if the text isn’t all legible, it creates an interesting latticework that plays against the “thing” that is painted. As an example, in the painting A Year and a Day the writing is the lyrics from the Beastie Boys song and that acts as the background to the boombox design. The result is a mini-monument to Adam Yauch’s life and his contribution and influence on hip-hop culture.
L&T: What artistic movements or traditions shape your work?
Pons: Candidly I owe a lot of my motivation to being creative to both skateboarding and the music I grew up on. In both skateboarding and hip-hop (and punk), they began as cultures created by kids who found a way of expressing themselves in new ways. Invention, innovation, improvisation, and a defiance of social norms is what makes those movements so interesting to me. My creative process can compared to how a DJ will search through bins of records looking for albums that may contain that gem of a music sample. I scour through books and magazines searching for nuggets of visual inspiration or simply paper and pattern that stimulates and inspires.
L&T: How has your long-standing love of skateboarding contributed to your craft?
Pons: Skateboarding will always be the kernel of my creative motivations. Growing up skateboarding in the late eighties taught me lot about what it requires to an artist. By that I mean things like consistency, working in variation, and frankly a willingness to fall. Most importantly skateboard culture forced me to think differently about my surroundings—and myself. What I enjoy about skating is that no matter what your aptitude is, you can get out there and keep pushing yourself and do it with style. So often as painter/muralist I get caught up on the doom scroll seeing all these artists do amazing work that I’m just not technically capable of achieving in some respects—but knowing that it’s more important and true to myself to create and express myself in my own language is what it’s all about. In addition, I think my spending so many years street skating (especially when we lived in New York City) built up my tolerance to be able to paint murals in public. That feeling of exposure and vulnerability when you’re trying to achieve something technically challenging in a pubic space is really invigorating.
