Profile: Espinosa Arts and Design

About Espinosa Arts and Design : IN ORDER to fully appreciate the works of artist Clifford Espinosa and his team of dedicated craftsmen, one must understand his artistic philosophy and the driving force behind his every creation:

“Liberate the art from the artist.”

Espinosa sees himself not as a designer who meticulously plans every space, corner, and detail of his works—but, rather, as a mediator who converses with his medium, seeking to understand the intentions behind the material and then unearthing and revealing them—layer by layer, block by block—through months of painstaking, laborious, and dedicated sandpapering, polishing, chipping, chopping, assembling, and reworking.

If Espinosa’s works have both earthly and ethereal qualities about them, it’s because the artist approaches his work as a monk does meditation and yoga. He directs himself and his work toward the integration of structure (the “body”), utility (“the mind”), and aesthetics (“the heart and soul”)—with heavy doses of discipline, patience, commitment, and centeredness—and without hurrying anything into being.

“Art is not self-expression,” Espinosa shares of his own creative philosophy. “Art is about uncovering and revealing an object’s own powers... You pull out everything that is good and true about the object, liberating art from the artist.”

When dealing with wood, his primary medium and an expression of his deep ties with Mother Earth and social issues, Espinosa says that he doesn’t force something into becoming a shape or a form that it refuses to become. “I won’t force it to straighten if it doesn’t want to be straight,” the artist says. “I allow the material’s innate qualities and capacities to come out—which then merge with the physical capabilities of our craftsmen, to reveal the result of a collective piece of work.”

“When you liberate art from the artist, you create new art and things,” Espinosa emphasizes. “When the artist limits himself or herself, he or she isn’t able to create as much. The creation process slows down.”

“This is why I don’t think about what to create,” he points out. “The flow of my creative process starts out like a trickle and ends up like a storm of rushing water. It happens on its own. It is a product of serendipity; it is not rushed or forced.”

In managing his team of craftsmen, Espinosa likens himself to an orchestral director or a conductor. He trains each

one on the critical fundamentals of his instrument and on the essentials of his craft, then lets each one loose to learn, create, and “make mistakes”—just as his maestro before him, Jerusalino “Jerry” Araos, had done. He also treats his people as family, “like brothers” and like the artistic guilds of old, who made sure to care for their own.

“Social art is a common effort,” Espinosa points out. “We are like a group that cannot play out of tune. Everyone must be in sync, in harmony. I’m just like their orchestral director.”

Espinosa also talks about “magic”—in managing people, in allowing this medium and his materials to speak for themselves, and in that final moment of revelation.

“You know you’ve created and revealed something beautiful when it leaves you speechless—when you can no longer react because of sheer awe.”

“You know ‘this is it’—this is the moment—when it’s no longer the mind who decides,” Espinosa says of that moment of completion. “It feels sacred because our people give their whole hearts to the process. It’s a matter of life and death for them.”

For Clifford Espinosa, the artist, who has “died” and evolved many times over for his art and craft, his work is an act of transcendence that goes beyond material, structure, form, and even the artist’s own intentions. It is an ongoing process of transformation—reshaping himself, his craftsmen, his art itself—and, he hopes, the world around him.

He quotes his late master, Araos, who used these words to convince the young Espinosa to leave the protest actions and instead use art as his mouthpiece for change: “If we can create the beautiful world that you want, here and now, isn’t that enough?”

Perhaps it was enough then. For Espinosa today, however, art is only the starting point of a grander mission to restore balance and harmony to society. In sharing more of his work to the world, he hopes to spark even more conversations about how we can liberate ourselves from the very structures that limit us—reimagining, instead, how we can create new forms of being, doing, and living.

 

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A' Design Award & Competition.