Miguel Machuca: Carving Light Out of the Dark

Miguel Machuca is standing in front of a roomful of art students at Fisher Middle School in Los Gatos, and he asks them: “You guys know what sculpture is, right? Well, this is the same, everything starts out black, and my job is to find out where the light belongs.”

Machuca is a Mexican-American artist living in San Jose. His signature media is charcoal. He creates his work by using electric erasers to draw on black charcoal surfaces, which are layered on top of white paint. Dozens of Machuca’s charcoal drawings, as well as a colorful piece of abstract art, surrounded him last Monday in art teacher Cesar Anzaldo’s classroom. They ranged in size from an eight by four foot panel to much smaller pieces that Machuca created while lying in a hospital bed in 2015 with Stage Four non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer.

Machuca taught a full day of classes and demonstrated his techniques during the lunch break at Fisher courtesy of the Art Docents of Los Gatos, which receives much of its funding through the Los Gatos Education Foundation(LGEF.) He is one of the Art Docents’ 2019 guest artists. Bay Area Painter Fleur Spolidor is scheduled to visit and spend the day at Daves Avenue and Lexington Elementary Schools mid-March, and Santa Cruz Sculptor Jenni Ward will spend the day teaching at Blossom Hill (April 1) and Van Meter (March 26th.) The Art Docents’ guest artist program brings the artists’ studios directly to the children. Every year, in every school, professional Bay Area artists inspire the children of the district with live demonstrations of their craft. These demonstrations may involve painting, sculpture, use of unconventional materials and even technology. Guest Artists directly involve the children in their creations by encouraging input on colors, design, materials, or inventive titles for the final work.

Machuca’s works are full of light and shadow, and recurring motifs. The darkness and light reflect the ups and downs in Machuca’s own emotional life.

“Every single piece that I do always has a deeper meaning,” he said in an interview. “It’s about what I think life does to me, and how I prevail, or how things can really press you down, but it’s OK, because you can’t have light without the darkness.”

Machuca’s father died in an accident when he was eight years old in Mexico, and then he and his family moved to San Jose. He said that he felt like a misfit growing up as a teenager, and his only passion was drawing. His path to becoming a professional artist was aided by friends: One of his friends urged Machuca to hire an agent when he was starting out, but when Machuca objected and said he didn’t have any money to hire one, the friend offered to be his agent for free. Soon thereafter, Machuca started exhibiting his work in various shows in San Jose, as he held down a day job working with autistic children at the Evergreen School District in San Jose.

Machuca’s career as an artist reached a pinnacle in 2014 when Triton Museum Curator Preston Metcalf asked him to do a solo show at the Santa Clara museum. Machuca told the roomful of students that he was initially plagued by self-doubt.

But he used his fear of failure to focus — and to power through one of the most difficult years of his life as he was being treated for Stage 4 cancer: He was diagnosed shortly after receiving the commission from The Triton. Machuca carried on working through the treatment and coming up with concepts for his solo show, which debuted last year.

The images of a Buddha wheel, internal organs and lungs that are scarred, and eyes looking out at you from roses are intense (see above.) But as Machuca explains the imagery, it all seems to make sense.

It might all seem too intense for middle schoolers, but it isn’t. When Machuca asks how many kids in one class either knew someone or had come in contact with people with cancer, three quarters of the room put up their hands. One student shared a story about her grandfather who made sure he travelled the world before he died of cancer.

Another student told Machuca that he knew the wheel in one of the pictures represented Buddha because the eight spindles represent the Buddhist concept of The Eightfold Path of spiritual practices that lead to enlightenment.

Machuca uses these stories to inspire and motivate the students. But his work also enhances the students’ learning about how to use and manipulate value as an element in artworks, said Anzaldo. Students in his class use value to create black and white portraits of celebrities, as well as self portraits.

When Machuca asks what would happen if you lit up one room and kept another it next to a dark one, another student replies: “The light shines into the darkness.”

Machuca replies: “That’s right. Be that light.”