Meet Darren Villegas
Today we’d like to introduce you to Darren Villegas.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Darren. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I graduated from street artist to art activist, to art educator. Like many teenagers growing up in the Inland Empire who are seeking an alternative to gang violence, I became fascinated with creating graffiti art at the age of 15, eventually moving to San Francisco as an adult to pursue this passion. Over the next ten years, my graffiti art matured into spray-painted murals which were featured in several nationally published art magazines and video documentaries. As a college student, I began educating myself on artists who used their artwork for social change, inspiring me to incorporate a newfound level of consciousness into my artwork. I began using my artwork to support local activist campaigns and started teaching a youth-based mural art class for several non-profit organizations at local community centers. Many young people were eager to enroll as students in my classes since my prior graffiti art persona held a certain amount of urban art cache. I saw echoes of my youth in the eyes of these teenagers, and I decided to use my influence to steer their lives in a positive direction.
I embraced the role of not only an art teacher but a life mentor to many of my students. I began incorporating educational workshops into the mural art process, where students were educated about the issues affecting their lives. We would dialogue about these topics as a group, brainstorm images for a mural composition, then execute a community-involved mural. These murals would beautify communities, empower the youth with a sense of self-worth and civic responsibility, and decrease vandalism. After ten years of performing this uplifting form of art activism, I was awarded a Certificate of Honor in the Arts from the San Francisco Mayor’s office and Board of Supervisors. I moved back to Riverside 4 years ago, and I’m very happy to continue to spread my vibrant artwork throughout the streets of Southern California. I have a long-term personal goal of establishing an art scholarship fund for Inland Empire high school students to transfer to a university and pursue a career in the arts.
Has it been a smooth road?
The hardest part of my journey has been transitioning my mindset away from the negative stigmas associated with some forms of street art and reframing my artwork toward a broader, more universal audience. Some of the struggles along the way included working up to four jobs at a time while attending the Academy of Art University of San Francisco. Also, being arrested multiple times in my early days for creating my artwork in the dark, unkept, forgotten parts of the urban landscape, beneath the street level and outside of the reality of the average citizen. Although these were rough times, full of struggle, they helped to shape my sense of resilience and dedication to my artwork and personal expressionism. Although the past may be painted in greyscale, I view the future as a blank canvas that I look forward to painting with the brightest, most vibrant colors of the rainbow!
Please tell us more about your art.
My murals and digital designs have a distinctly colorful and vibrant attack. I use brightly saturated tones and high contrast to bring my imagery and lettering to life. I want my artwork to shout out positivity to you! It feels great to have people now recognize my style and reach out to me for art installations. My personal arsenal of unique imagery combinations include: cosmic, dust-filled, star-sprinkled space scenes, richly saturated, dramatically lit roses and other flowers, multi-cultural colorful textile patterns, pale color-washed clouds, flowing shiny golden ribbons, impressionistic facial portraiture, simplified pastel interpretations of iconic architecture, and vibrantly colored overlapping stylized cursive script textures. These are the building blocks of my style, but I’m constantly nurturing these elements for growth into their future manifestations. It is a very fun ride to be on!
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
More and more people are accessing the creative and artistic sides of themselves, and it is becoming more and more accepted by society at large. I feel that visual creativity is the new frontier. As in the past, there have been huge world-changing inventions such as the automobile, alternating current, and computer technology, the future will turn the human mind inward to unlock history’s next era of imaginative innovation. The fusion of technology and the human artistic power of imagination will bring about the next era of evolution, and the ability to produce useful applications from this fusion will be the currency of the future. Rather than mining for gold, coal, or oil, in the future the person who can mine their own imagination for creative, artistic, and most importantly, visual expressions will be valued by large industry far beyond the current amount of value assigned to them.
If you had to start over, what would you have done differently?
If I had to start over, I would have given myself permission to let my true spirit sing right from the beginning. For so many years in the beginning of my art journey, I held myself captive within the prison of fear. As I have matured as a person and as an artist, I recognize that it is ok to be uniquely yourself and express that spirit as such. Do not be afraid to let your true light shine onto the world. You may be freeing other people from their own prison without even knowing it. Inspiration is the currency of artists, and imagination is our strongest weapon. All things must be imagined in our minds before they manifest into the physical world. So imagine hard, bright, and vibrantly!
