When Marc Trujillo goes to Costco, it’s an inspirational experience. He walks around the store, sometimes with his wife, Linda, other times alone, taking it all in. And not just Costco; he does it at Radio Shack, Target, and Wendy’s, too. As an urban landscape painter, Marc finds a kind of ironic poetry in views of everyday life. “I feel kind of ashamed of North American culture, and then sometimes I’m kind of like, ‘Wow, this is great,’” he says.

Born in Albuquerque, N.M., Marc lived in Texas, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York before settling in Los Angeles 10 years ago. All the traveling has made him a bit of an expert on the landscape of American cities. “What I like about the kind of spaces that I show is that it could be anywhere in North America,” he says. “I don’t put in palm trees. They always touch on people’s fantasy life.”

And fantasy doesn’t interest Marc. He’s after the minutiae of reality. His paintings, which could be mistaken for photography at first glance, are actually the anti-photograph. “The iris of a camera changes the way things look,” he says, “and I don’t have to calibrate those relationships in painting.” Instead, Marc has absolute control over every single compositional detail of each painting. He measures out all the planes so that what looks like a spontaneous moment is the result of direct observation, snapshots, sketches and careful planning. He recreates what we see every day, taking poetic license to move things around for the sake of the composition.

In 1000 San Fernando Rd, he removed a battery display to create a play on full and void, and then added a woman in the background near the vanishing point. It’s this kind of attention to detail that Marc gleans from paintings that inspire him, with 17th century Holland being his primary source of inspiration. Like Johannes Vermeer, Marc works exclusively in oil and he looks to Rembrandt as a source to create a structured work that appears unforced.

It’s actually thanks to Rembrandt that Marc pursued painting. As an undergrad at the University of Texas in the late 1980’s, Marc was planning on going to architecture school. He minored in music and toyed with the idea of going to film school. In fact, it was around this time that he became friends with filmmaker Robert Rodriguez and worked on the music for his first film, El Mariachi. But it was Rembrandt’s Landscape with a Stone Bridge that sealed the deal. Even years after first discovering this painting, Marc still gets excited as he flips through a huge art-history book in his office looking for a picture of the painting.

“What appeals to me is that it looks spontaneous, but it has a rigid structure underneath,” he says. “Maybe it’s not entirely verbal. There’s something painting can do, specifically this kind of painting, that resonates with me.” Marc takes his passion for 17th century Holland and translates it into familiar visuals of 21st century America. “I do research from other paintings and then I do my own research looking at the world,” he says. This formula is clearly working for him. He’s been receiving accolades since his grad school days at Yale and is now the recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.

Marc, who has been an art professor at Santa Monica College since 2000, is getting ready to go to New York to receive his award when we meet. His small office on campus is overflowing with art history books, images of works by artist friends, bottles of paint, a map of the world, and his own reproduction of Vermeer’s Maidservant Pouring Milk all thrown together, giving the impression of a serious-yet-unassuming artist.

On the wall at the back of his office hangs a small Native American rug from his grandfather’s office in New Mexico. Marc thinks it is Navajo but isn’t sure, so he promises to check with his grandmother and get back to me. Sure enough, the next day I get a message from Marc, who spoke with his grandmother and confirmed it is a Navajo blanket. This seems to be pretty typical: if he doesn’t know the answer he’s not going to make it up; he’ll do his research and get back to you. Marc has formal East Coast training with West Coast unpretentiousness. In his work, he blends so-called high and low cultures to create a seamless middle ground.

In 6181 Sepulveda Boulevard, Marc’s virtuoso talent in depicting light is showcased as he perfects ambient, fluorescent, and incandescent lights. And his use of saturated color to get the gradation of blues at twilight is worthy of a 17th century Dutch master.

And then there’s the fact that he’s painting a Wendy’s.

This large-format painting reveals one of Marc’s tongue-in-cheek idiosyncrasies: he painted his friend, Chris Ware, sitting inside Wendy’s. Chris, who is also an artist, used to work at the fast-food chain many years ago.

In other paintings, Marc has included his friend Sean Cheetham, his dog, or a woman he saw at a store once. So how does he decide who goes where? “A lot of it is compositional,” Marc says. “But also, I sort of cast them like a movie – a one-frame movie.” So, while Marc does recreate reality, he tweaks it to get what he wants. “‘You’re painting the world in your own mind,’” Marc says, quoting Leonardo da Vinci to help explain his approach to painting reality.

The irony is that Marc’s work has caught the eye of major corporations who want a piece of the cultural action. Several summers ago, Marc was commissioned by Radio Shack to paint one of its stores. After researching every Radio Shack in a 20-mile radius, he found one with sufficient spatial depth to make an interesting composition. Armed with a camera and sketchbook, he was ready to get to work when the employees kindly requested he stop. After contacting corporate headquarters, he was eventually allowed to return and work. He was even offered pizza by the apologetic employees.

His painting is now hanging in Radio Shack’s Dallas corporate headquarters. Target also snapped up a few of Marc’s paintings of the store for their own corporate offices. While he doesn’t mind, the irony isn’t lost on him. “As a corporation they probably just want to show that they’re part of a dialogue with culture,” he says. “That’s the thing – sometimes homage and satire get flipped.” They may get flipped, but he made sure to add a little subversive element in his Radio Shack painting: he depicted someone making a return.

This summer, Marc will trade in Radio Shack and Wendy’s for the Louvre and the Prado. The Guggenheim Fellowship has awarded him the means to travel to these institutions of high art. “Being confronted with taste that’s as refined as what’s in these museums calibrates you as a painter,” he says. “It’s a cycle: look at paintings, figure out what painting is, look at the world, and paint what you see.” After spending time learning “from our dead betters,” as Marc says, he’ll return to the land of fast-food and retail chains to provide the Target shopper a heightened experience of what it’s like to go into the store.

As Marc reflects on how the Guggenheim Fellowship will affect his career, he is typically humble. “OK, some serious people have taken you seriously,” he says. “Maybe people will look a little longer, hopefully they’ll give me an extra 10 seconds.”

As he gets ready to go to New York, it’s easy to forget that this laid-back California transplant is traveling to the center of the art world to receive an honor once given to Ansel Adams, W.H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov. But don’t let his modesty fool you: Marc Trujillo is a world-class painter with a brilliant career well underway.

Written by: Yasmine Mohseni
ARTWORKS Magazine – Summer 2008