arcenio martin campos - figurative oil paintings and drawings

ARTIST BIO

Arcenio Martin Campos attended New Mexico State University for studio arts, and then the University of New Mexico for studies in art history. He began drawing on his own as a child, and between schools acquired much of his fine art education from independent study and private instruction in the human figure. From 1999 through 2002 he taught small classes in cast drawing and facilitated open figure drawing groups in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Martin recently graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, receiving a Certificate in Painting. He is currently searching for stories for the figures he’s drawn over the course of his life.

ARTIST STATEMENT

As a child I drew the things that represented what I wanted to be; trucks to drive, jets and helicopters to fly. As a youth I began to draw people, especially girls – pretty girls I desired as much as I had desired trucks and jets in my early childhood. Drawing pretty girls I wanted to be with eventually evolved into drawing the human figure for the sake of fascination with what makes us people. The next thing I knew, I no longer needed to be a truck driver or a jet fighter; I was an artist – an artist who focused on the figure.

For nearly twenty years I studied the physical components of human beings – all of them; all componenets, all people, not just the pretty ones. Lately, all of these people I have been drawing, and many of their respective parts, have been stirring, growing restless. They are no longer content to simply be portrayed on paper, mylar, canvas or panel. They have urgent stories to tell.They strive to be part of a world.

This is a new development for me. It is at this moment that the thousands of loose body parts floating around inside my head are beginning to come together – not just as the completed figures I have been drawing for years – but as individual lives that are trying to complete themselves and come into existence.