Today we’d like to introduce you to Gabriel Castro.
Gabriel, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
It is neither strange nor unique to say that I have been drawing ever since I could hold a pencil. I think you’ll find that a pretty common trait in my field with few exceptions.
If, while growing up, you ever had a classmate who was always quietly sketching away in loose pieces of paper or a beaten to hell sketchbook while the teacher lectured, that was me.
It wasn’t until I was nine and my parents made a hard decision to move to the U.S. from my native Chile, that my art became more and more a source of escapism.
Later, at the ages of 15-19 it became therapy, as my experiences of being bullied, language barriers and unchecked anger issues, coupled in with undiagnosed BPD, that my sketchbooks began to sport ripped up pages, torn by ink-covered nibs and lead sharp enough to kill a man, “dark art” you may call it now, at the time it was just me letting off steam, taking my emotions and finding a place where I can give them physical form in hopes of trapping them between paper and eventually, woven canvas.
I always wanted to become a concept artist for games, comics, tv shows, movies etc… but as I got older and I heard more and more people telling me that working in the industry meant I would give up any time to make my art and would only be there to bring other people’s ideas to life, (something that I later on realized wasn’t as true or harsh as they made it seem) that I decided to pursue fine arts, both for its emphasis on each artist truly embracing their own vision above all else, and it’s adoration for the bohemian artist style of always being just a bit off-beat from the rest of the world.
Do to art history classes taught by Art Historian Lori Rusch, figure drawing taught by “Currado malaspina” and painting by Barry Markowitz, I found the voice that seemed right for me.
That was High school, after that I went to the Laguna College of Art and Design, which allowed me to go study sculpture for a semester at the Florence Academy of Art under Robert Bodem and many more great craftsmen/women. Sculpture being something I loved doing as a child but never finding a good class that taught how to do figures and wasn’t just ceramics.
Eventually, after graduating and getting my BFA, I finished one last year at FAA and decided that ten years of art school was enough. I rarely get along with other artists and hearing someone discuss the intricate differences between Sorolla and Sargent during lunch for the 57th time had me pulling my hair out.
Ten years of art school is a lot, ten years of anything is a lot to be honest. I returned to LA with my bowl completely full, and with some personal stuff that made my “using art as therapy” strategy completely crash and burn, almost killing my passion for art altogether.
Eventually, I found a good job in DTLA and moved with some friends to Arcadia where now I can start to re-find my love for those strange activities I started too many years ago.
Finding my family in Long Beach, at the Dark Art Emporium, a cesspool of punks, metalheads, special effects artists and other blooming painters who find little to no satisfaction in the conventional art world, was exactly what I needed and still to this day, continue to grow from.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The path that has been my life thus far has been anything but smooth. I find myself often questioning my own voice, whether or not I have what it takes to be a great artist. Which has so unfortunately been linked with financial success, in a time where even careers that should be stable are at their worst.
Yet living in the U.S. has given me a sense of how many great things I can achieve just by knowing the right people, being at the right place at the right time, trusting in fate once in a while and going with your gut.
I always find that when I set my mind to something, such as my desire to study paint in Venice back in high school, translated in spending about two years living in Italy studying sculpture.
Things never turn out how you envision them, but if you are true to what you want, you may get lucky and find something better or at least on par with what you wanted.
And it is luck, I’m afraid, I wish I could sit here and tell everyone that if you work hard and do your best that good things will happen to you, but that isn’t the case.
Even tho I am an immigrant, I won the genetic lottery by being white, male and straight. A privilege that not everyone enjoys. The other side of my life lessons living the U.S.
Moving to a completely different country at such a crucial time of my life, right before my teens, made things incredibly difficult, and seeded issues that I am still to this day struggling with, not to mention my recent diagnosis (about two years now) of Bipolar disorder and my continuing education on why sometimes I feel the need to do five different paintings while punching a bag, listening to heavy metal and reading the latest political news at the same time, taking over conversations and going on borderline, narcissistic rants while other days barely having the energy to get up and go to work or even do things I would normally enjoy.
I’ve slept in motels for months while looking for a home, I’ve lost relationships because of my illness and my lack of social education that comes in those early years of teenage-hood.
Most recently, I’ve struggled with the desire to just end it all and give up art as a career completely, focusing on my current day-job and traveling, another great passion of mine.
Finding the time to just silence all the noise around my art and everyone who keeps pushing me to do more, make more, be more… All I can say to anyone going down this road is to learn when to listen, and then learn when to shut everyone out and do what you think is right. It’s a difficult choice, and one you will definitely screw up many times, but just like art, life’s a learning process that only stops when you stop listening.
I think the only thing that’s kept me going despite of all my eternal struggles and times I’ve hurt other people or done stupid things is the idea that I am capable of overcoming any flaws that I may have thru therapy, hard work, and just plain fucking refusal to lie down and die. As much as you want to sometimes.
There were points at which I could have died. Either thru a small hole in my lung at birth, a near fall off a cliff at 15, or even something small like barely missing a car collision a few times in LA, all could have ended my life in a blink of an eye.
The fact that I’m still here, the fact that I can still think critically and remind myself that my next step in my evolution is one of spiritual and emotional intelligence and understanding and that I have the ability to do better than yesterday, is one of the few things keeping me going thru it all.
We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
My name is Loneschach (pronounced LOUN-Shack). I am a classically trained Painter and Sculptor. I spent ten years painting and drawing with about six years in sculpture.
I primarily make figurative art that either represents or speaks of something in the human psyche, my self-portraits are the best example along with a small piece “No hay aire tras los espejos” which was done for a show at the Dark Art Emporium not too long ago.
I find that my crowning achievement as an artist is that so far, people seem to really stop and look at my work, trying to figure out what my pieces are about. When they ask me for explanations I always ask the same thing “what do you think it’s about?” and I honestly revel in the stories people tell me, it’s always them projecting their own ideas on to what I’ve created and while other people gasp at the mere thought of someone interpreting their work “the wrong way” I always see it as part of the process.
I got what I wanted out of the piece, I made it. I spent hours upon hours, months and months on end slaving at the easel. In other words, I had my time with it, now it’s time for it to be enjoyed and studied by everyone else.
I don’t consider myself a “Dark artist”. I call myself a “Macabrist” someone who uses iconography of death and suffering as a momento mori, a reminder that death comes for all of us, the great equalizer, we all suffer, we all go thru identity crisis, we all try to escape the trappings of our own mind in some way or another. And while most people would see that as a downer, I see that as beautiful.
The Trans person living in Alabama has gone thru much more than most, and lived a completely different life than, say, a miner in Ghana, but sit them both down and let those people talk for long enough in the right environment and you WILL find similarities, things they both fear, things they both love that may not be too far from the other.
We’re all human, we all die, we all cum, shit and eat. Those things are universal and I think my biggest mission as an artist is to try and bring the basic human emotions and experiences that bring us together to the forefront, haven’t you ever noticed that the things that unite us, sex, drugs, death and empathy for those different from us, are the things which we often consider taboo? I have. I’ve been studying all of you, I’m still studying, and it makes for great imagery.
All in the hopes of helping everyone, including myself. My struggles and issues are not extraterrestrial or etherial in any way, I’m in the shit just as much as the next person, by learning more about the world and breaking it down in art, I can hope to maybe help my own journey to becoming what may one day pass as “a descent human being”.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
On a technical level, I wish I hadn’t listened so much to the people scarring me from learning more about entertainment design, maybe would’ve taken more 3-D classes and knew how to work my way around Zbrush or Maya (something I’m retroactively trying to do).
I would have also like to have been diagnosed earlier, I would go thru how many embarrassing and friendship-ending scenarios could have been avoided if I knew what “mania” really was and how to deal with it. But we’d be here all day.
But… If I had to start all over… I’d rather just not to be honest. Ask me again in 20 years.
Contact Info:
- Address: Teale Sculpture Studio, where I teach sculpture.
13040 Cerise Ave Suite O, Hawthorne, CA 90250 - Website: https://www.loneschach.com/
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/loneschach/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LoneschachArt/
Image Credit:
Loneschach
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