Maquette for The Story of LA 1988

Carlos Almaraz made this Maquette for The Story of LA, with watercolor and pencil, and the process seems very much on display. It’s an open way of working. It’s like he’s thinking out loud with these colors, sketching with the brush, letting one color bleed into another. Look at the way he uses the light blues and greens to evoke the city's landscape. The paint is thin, transparent, almost like a wash, which gives the whole piece this airy, dreamlike quality. There’s a looseness to his touch, a sense of immediacy, like he’s capturing a fleeting moment, or a feeling. In the first section, the figure in pink almost disappears into the warm oranges and browns of the ground. Almaraz was a part of ASCO, a Chicano artist collective, and I see echoes of David Hockney in this piece. The use of color to evoke a feeling of place. It’s not just about what you see, but how you feel when you see it. It leaves a lot of room for your own imagination to fill in the gaps.