We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jose Silva. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jose below.

Alright, Jose thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

Just about every one of my creations are meaningful, specially in the past year, I create with deep meaning and intention. My best friend, Javier Tellez, passed away a week into this year as I held his hand at the hospital, and I feel like he’s inspired everything I’ve done. I made a portrait of him along with a video where I talk about him and our friendship and what it’s been like to loose him, and this portrait is predominantly displayed at home and it’s become a physical and visual place for me to connect with him and talk to him, and he has inspired all the art I’ve created this year and I didn’t realize how this particular image I created would become such a meaningful symbol for me of love and connection to my friend. I look at it and think of him every single day.

Jose, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’ve been artistic since I was a kid, but I also loved movies and visual effects, after graduating high school I decided to attend art school for Visual Effects and Motion Graphics, it was the perfect blend of design work and video and creativity. I currently do that for a living, but I also paint watercolors, acrylics, mixed media, sculpture, I just enjoy exploring different forms of art, and lately I’ve been creating complimenting art videos where I can dive a little more in depth into the concept that are inspiriting me, which generally are related to emotions. I like to dive into the darkest of emotions that are difficult to talk about. I’ve realized I was different years ago, and it was just because I’m gay, or from a different country, but because I have a lot of empathy and compassion for people so I’m able to talk about emotions and about self discovery and love and compassion, which are parts of me I used to hide, I felt like talking about emotions was not the type of subject people where particularly excited about but I realize I’m someone who feels deeply, and being a man who feels deeply and is not afraid to be emotional and to share that usually sets me apart and so I now lean into it. And I like to explore different feelings in different forms, I’m exploring more and more into video, into writing, and I’m getting into music for the past couple of years, and I think that also sets me apart, I’m not looking to ever choose one thing, I wanna always be able to explore and learn and express myself in as many ways as possible.

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

Absolutely! I love to read! I read a lot of self help books, and I always try to find lessons that I can apply in my artistic journey. I believe one of the most difficult things as an artist is trying to find balance in life, being able to maintain a healthy lifestyle while keeping a roof over your head, trying to have a social life, keep up with social media and all the other things, while making time to create, to actually produce art. A lot of artist struggle to find the time to create because they get busy with life, and I hear this from artists all the time. It really is not easy sometimes to have to decline invitations or to balance things out and make enough time to create and there’s only so many hours in the day, so the time has to come from somewhere. The “7 habits of highly efficient people” by Stephen Covey changed my life and allowed me to prioritize art, and prioritize my time accordingly so that I’m clear about what’s important to me and what’s not important which has allowed me to make more time for art and become more disciplined.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I think non-creative people struggle to understand how much time it’s required to create something. Not only does it take a certain amount of time to produce, but even before I start creating I’ve already spent time thinking about what I wanna say and how I wanna express this concept and what materials, gathering everything and planning and making sure the message and the execution are cohesive, and that’s before and brush even touches the canvas. And then there’s all this other time that goes into putting your art out there in social media, art shows, networking, to make sure that the art gets seen after it’s been created. So paintings sometimes are hard to price because there’s all this time that doesn’t get considered and the years of experience that allow an artist to perfect their craft, and yet art gets valued in ways that don’t realistically or accurately really represent the time spent into every piece of art.

Contact Info:

• Website: Josesilvaart.com
• Instagram: Josesilvaart
• Facebook: Josesilvaartpage
• Youtube: Josesilvaart