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Jose Lopes grew up in Mexico City, absorbing the culture, the smog, the will to live and the drama of all Mexicans. Forever fascinated by the magnificent murals of the great Mexican masters, the pre-Columbian artifacts and architecture and the folk culture, he could not escape the influence of the ancient cultures and their preoccupation with death and the underworld which has been part of Jose since then. In 1991, after finishing high school, Jose begun to study art, first at Los Angeles City College and later (years later) at El Camino College where he received an award for "outstanding academic achievement in the field of art." Jose's work hangs on the walls of numerous collectors throughout California. He has been a member of the Los Angeles Art Association since 2001 and is a regular participant at both the Cannibal Flower Traveling Show and the Hangar 1018 monthly spectacles. "I paint as a response to an internal drive, an urgency, a sense or duty to the world and to myself. I paint in an effort to gain that edge the insane have over the rational man. My work is the result of constant exploration and improvisation. It is the evolution of methods and techniques given to me by teachers and friends to help me find a personal vocabulary that would allow me to inflict a wound in the viewers' heart. Each painting is created without a precise idea of what the finished piece will look like. From a pool of color and shadows forms and shapes emerge to stare back at me and remind me of the news I heard yesterday or the love I lost last year. In an effort to engage the viewers' own personality and individual ideologies, I have opted to leave some shapes unresolved. The viewer can then find in the shadows his own demons and have them breed with mine to create a third form of reality. As a result, my nagging demons and angels commune with the observers' own creatures spawning a world that is no longer mine but an addition of both artist and spectator's insanity."