Alexandria Canchola’s illustrations are noticeably colorful. Not one to shy away from color, the Texas-based designer, illustrator, and professor admits she loves color the way she loves bubbly sparkling water – a lot. Working mostly with gouache, Canchola says she enjoys its velvety matte finish and opaque highly pigmented color.
“I prefer working small, there is an intimacy between myself and the illustration,” she further explained in an interview with K Space Contemporary. “I hunch over the page, a closeness I’m not sure is healthy, but a position I constantly find myself in.” According to Canchola, gouache is an unforgiving medium, and as such, paying close attention is necessary.
Working with references and planning ahead before each painting is also important. “I start with reference photos, I make a quick light sketch and move forward,” says Canchola. Treating painting as an ongoing process, she starts with the background and lays down the colors she most interested in exploring. “I approach color in regard to their relationships with each other, one and then the next, and so on. The process is an intuitive one.”
Amongst her sources of inspiration, Canchola counts colors, letterforms, and filmmaking, but more importantly – storytelling. “There’s something about each one of us that lends ourselves to a story,” she notes. “My work is inspired by and draws from the narrative; a personal form of storytelling that helps us to make sense of the everyday, of the societal patterns we see and the relationships we experience.”
According to Canchola, her intent is to blur the distinctions between our perceptions of reality and our creations within it. An award-winning illustrator, her gouache painting, “Avoiding it feels kinder” from the series, “Peek-a-Peep”, was recently selected to be a part of American Illustration’s collection of art, The Archive.
Scroll down to see some recent highlights from her Instagram page, and show her some love on social media.
