Early Hawaiians 1983

Carlos Almaraz made this painting, Early Hawaiians, with oil paint, and you can really see the energy he poured into it. It's a dance of color and bodies, a swirl of impressions rather than a literal scene. The painting is alive with thick brushstrokes, swimming with blues and oranges, pinks and greens all jostling for space. There's a real physicality to the paint; you can almost feel the artist's hand moving across the canvas, layering and blending, building up a surface that's both textured and luminous. The figures are not static, but caught in motion, their forms elongated and blurred. Look at the way Almaraz uses these energetic lines to define the figures against the lush, almost psychedelic landscape. It's as if the very air is vibrating with energy. Almaraz, who drew inspiration from artists like Van Gogh and Gauguin, channels their spirit of expressive colour and loose, gestural brushwork, but with a contemporary twist. This piece is like a dream, where memory and imagination collide, and the boundaries between the real and the imagined dissolve.