ABOUT THE ARTIST, THE ART AND ITS EXPRESSION
THE ARTIST
Rodrigo Lois
Born in Chile in 1953
Lives in Orange County, California
Molecular Biologist by training
Retired from Cal State Fullerton
Creative Interests:
Painting
Sculpture
Photography
Gardening
Poetry
Painting with the voice
Self Portrait - Dec 2006
HOW ART FOUND ME AND CHANGED MY PERSPECTIVE IN LIFE
I began to explore painting around 2003. It must have been being face to face with my mortality that gave me the need to find ways of expressing myself other than through the logical, the pragmatic and the “shy-away-from-the-mysterious-or-the spiritual” that my scientific upbringing molded on me. I began painting what I saw outside, but quickly I began to understand what my only true art teacher, Donna Hanna-Chase, was always hinting at, that the path to art is through the soul. 
Healing through fire 2012
I began to see that one has but to look inward to reach a wealth of images that represent what it is to be human, images that at times take a dimension that is much larger than ourselves. The essence of creativity is having the courage to open the doors to our inner world and to allow whatever wants to come to the surface to do so and then to just record––to just record in the form of colors, lines and shapes on canvas or clay or whatever medium, to just record, without interference from the logical mind––to just record.
AO photo215
HOW ART AWAKENED A LONGING TO EXPLORE THOSE DEEP PLACES IN ME THAT HAD BEEN DISREGARDED FOR SO LONG
Engaging in art like this, created havoc with the workings of my logical mind and eventually made me reevaluate all I thought I knew about the world.
While creating like this, the imagery that appears in the art takes in many instances a spiritual aura that doesn’t cease to astound me, or better said, to astound that pragmatic, no-non-sense, material and objective part of the molecular biologist in me. My logical mind since the beginning was puzzled by the fact that none of the imagery that appears on the art objects I create were imagined or pictured by me before they began to take form on the canvas or the clay. This logical mind has, in all honesty, been unable, by any means, to explain how it is that those it sees in a finished piece of art appeared there.
My logical mind's analysis goes like this:
"Those images were never seen before by the logical mind, because neither through memory nor through imagination were those images part of the artist consciousness. The artist did allow his hands to move, but those movements were without a purpose because no specific images were being painted. Yet, the artist sees those images for the first time on the finished piece of art created supposedly by him."
Slowly, slowly my logical mind was forced to accept certain truths about the universe. The first one was that the logical mind cannot understand how art is created! and also that there must be much more to this world than just what the logical mind can see, experience or understand.
It was thus, that art awoke an interest in looking beyond the material, and to beginning to explore that part in me and in all of us that was the real artist. It forced me to start looking inside.
Family Mar 2011
Sometimes when I paint it feels as if it were the brush, or just the hand, which without any input from me, is searching for the right color and choosing the place where the paint will go on the canvas.
At other times it feels as if I were there, standing in front of the canvas, knowing nothing about painting or about this specific painting, as if I were there not expecting anything in particular, just there, observing with a sense of curiosity, whatever the hand, or the brush, or the paint will do in the next moment.
There is always a sense of awe that envelops me when I see how a painting or a sculpture begins to take form by itself, as if created by something much larger than myself, and ends up being a complete work having a certain composition, a certain rythm and a certain distribution of colors, of lines and shapes that tell a story. A unique story, a story which was not created by me, a story that arose from an unknown place that could be both very far and very near.
It is also always a sense of utter freedom that surrounds me when I allow creativity to be expressed in this manner. It is felt as a complete and all encompassing feeling of having no boundaries, of being free to allow the painting to go in any direction it wants to take without any constraints, of being free to take it to unknown regions never known or visited before, of being free with the absolute certainty that nothing could ever go wrong. And nothing ever goes wrong when the “allowing the painting to be done by itself” is total. It is a s if the universe does takes charge when we trust in it so totally that we let it do through us what it will.
Oh, if we could only live our lives like that!!
The freedom we would feel to let the universe take over our doing in complete trust, knowing that whatever it does through us, whatever it does through the rest of mankind, whatever it does through the material realm is exactly as it should be. It is in that knowing that the absolute certainty that nothing could ever go wrong would always accompany us.
The light Mar 2015
(Something that feels as if it comes from the same depth that painting comes, tells me that if we did exactly that in our lives, we would then feel so completely free and absolutely certain that nothing that is happening in life could ever be wrong. To trust so completely in the universe that we let it be in charge of our doing instead of us being the doers, or to let the universe do trough us what is needed at every moment––just like I have seen it happen while I engage in art––would make us then feel deep within ourselves, that neither us nor anyone else could ever do something wrong, or could ever take the wrong path. And with that certainty, we would once again (although it may seem to us as if it were the first time) be in tune with the harmony of the whole, because it would be exactly that harmony, the harmony of life that that would be speaking through us. And that same something, tells me that the harmony of life that speaks through us if we allow it, is nothing else but what we call love, but a much deeper love, real love, love without conditions or expectations, love that accepts everything and everyone exactly as they are, love that says that everything is fine, exactly as it should be, like this, at this moment and in every moment ever).