We recently connected with Jesus Trujillo and have shared our conversation below.

Jesus, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you happier as a creative? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job? Can you talk to us about how you think through these emotions?

As of right now I’m happy doing what I’m doing as artist. It’s an interesting life and I get to meet all sorts of people and see all kinds of cool artwork. Hell, I’m slowly starting to get to touch some of the artwork as I pick up side gigs as an art handler too. Though I do sometimes wonder how life would be doing at a boring dead-end job but then I realize that that’s not the life for me. I worked in retail once and I quit after a few months working there because of a conversation I had with one of my workers there one day. I forgot his name but he had told me he was working there at Stein Mart since he was 17 years old and I kind of just stood there was taken back because how could you work at this boring place for so long? Yeah, I think that kept running through my head at the time and then I ended up quitting shortly after. That was my one and only time working retail. I’m never going back. Making art is some much fun and freeing than retail haha.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Hey there! I’m Jesus Cristo Trujillo and I received my Bachelors of Fine Arts from the University of Texas in Arlington. I started taking my art career seriously around the time Covid hit and I managed to continue to stay persistent with my work since then. I primarily work with plywood and I try figured out cool ways to bend and curve these pieces. As of lately though, I started to add aggressive spanish phrases to my work that have been either said to me or things that I have said to others. I feel as if these phrases are often over looked and sometimes stick with you for the rest of your life. I’m still not too sure how to feel about it right now since I’m still in the beginning phases of this. So it might change as I continue to make more work.
I believe what sets me apart from others is the way I bend and curve my plywood pieces. A lot of the times to get the shape I want I usually follow along the wood grains to get this organic type shape and I readjust and add some of my own flair to it whenever I’m cutting it out with the jigsaw. I also believe that due to the way these piece bend and curve, they are easily more recognizable when you see them in gallery spaces. Most of the time you expect to see canvases on the wall; not these weird shaped curved wood pieces. So people tend to remember the weird looking artworks most of the time, you know?

What I’m the most proud of is myself. It might sound pretentious or whatever but I truly am proud of myself and how I managed to stick with the art world seriously. I struggled a lot because I never wanted to be an artist in the first place and I almost gave up everything a a year before Covid, My artwork was horrible back then and I felt like I was wasting my time doing something I hated. So I started over and began fresh again. I picked up some leftover plywood that was sitting in my shed for years and just went at it with that. I think that’s when things were starting to pick up for me. I became excited, a resurgence of art for my dimlitted heart. I stayed persistent and did the research and I kept on making work. This was my second chance and I hope to continue making art for a long while now.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

Man I love me some early 2000’s wrestling. John Cena vs Kurt Angle 2002, the start of the “Ruthless Aggression” era is what I based my current body of work off of. The debut of John Cena came off as impactful and strong willed and I was influenced by that fond memory. More things that easily impacted me were reading mangas and comics. I really liked the ones that have a very expressive, surreal and raunchy artstyle like Dorohedoro, Chainsawman and even Doom Patrol back when Grant Morrison was writing it. I like watching a lot of video essays about music and the rock bands that I grew up listening to like the Foo Fighters and Paramore and so on. Jrpg’s are also cool. Love me some Final Fantasy IX too. So yeah. I think this bunch kind of rounds me up and how I go about things in the long scheme of things.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

For me I think the most rewarding aspect of being an artist is helping others get started in their own art career. Since I work at UTA and use the studio spaces there to work on my own things, I can give out advice and tell some of the students about the art calls and call for entries that are being posted on instagram or callforentry.org. I try to encourage them to apply and put their artworks to be seen in the public. As a little motivational push for them. I also try to give them artist references for them to research to help push their work in the direction they’re looking for. The reason why I try to help out as much is because during the covid days when I was usually the only one in the empty studio spaces at school, I didn’t really have that kind of help in applying to galleries or any kind of information until lockdown slowly to lift. I hope that whatever I learned from my past experiences will be eventually helpful to them in someway or another.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/imjoniibass?igshid=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
• Twitter: Susjex Trujillo (@ImJoniiBass) / X https://twitter.com/ImJoniiBass