My Purpose
I am Joe Barajas and I am an expressionism oil painter. My inspirations when I first started painting were works by Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Vincent van Gogh, just to name a few. I took what I saw in their work and mixed and molded different aspects of their techniques to eventually develop my own unique style of expressionism painting. I started out using symbolism to express events and life lessons I had experienced in my life creating visual representations to depict to my viewers who I was as a person. I then shifted goals and started to try and depict who I was as an artist—who I was as a creative. Ultimately I decided that if I was going to paint anything of substance I would have to look outside of myself and allow myself to depict a broad view of the world around me; mainly the people in it. With so much to choose from, I decided to start with the human psyche—what we show and don’t show to the world. I want to depict the things about ourselves that we hide out of fear of showing the people around us who we really are and the fear of ultimately not being accepted because of it. I also want to depict the facade we present in place of the truth. This brings the purpose behind my work up to date considering what people have to hide can provide endless possibilities for numerous themes for my artwork. My path and purpose behind my work will no doubt transform in the future, but for now I choose to reveal that which people try to hide—the truth about us all—who we are. First, I’ll start with what we show others, and then I’ll allow that to lead the way to the depiction of what’s really there underneath.