He is known for his artistic skills, but not these artistic skills.
As the concertmaster of the Prince George Symphony Orchestra, Jose Delgado-Guevara is considered among the best musicians to live in northern B.C.
But painting? Not so much.
That underestimation was a fair one. It was less than a year ago that he picked up a paintbrush for the first time. Yet here he is, getting his speech ready for the artist's talk Thursday night at his debut exhibition reception at the Two Rivers Gallery.
As someone who, emblematic by his profession, clearly takes artistic pursuits seriously, the visual arts world should have seen this coming. IThe PGSO's offices are at Studio 2880 in the same complex as the Community Arts Council has its artist in residence. It was just a matter of inevitable happenstance that he and Corey Hardeman would cross paths.
"Corey said she wanted to teach," Delgado-Guevara said. "I thought I'd give it a try, and I got sort of obsessed with it. I couldn't stop. It's something that's stronger than you. I'm still taking lessons from Corey but also seeking out my own information."
The canvass took over his spare time. Twelve hours would go by and he'd realize he hadn't put the brush down. Other than his music, it was all he engaged in at times.
"And music informs me too - the discipline, the rhythm," he said. "You see rhythm a couple of ways: how you present the figures on the canvas and how you use the brushes. Your brush has to move a certain way, and it translates into the ways you represent clothing or to represent grass. You have to move to do that, the brush has to stroke, and that takes on its own form."
He will explain a little about this at the opening reception. Delgado-Guevara will be at the gallery at 7:30 on Thursday night for a free reception and artist's talk to officially open the show. He is contemplating how much to disclose about his technique, hoping to not bore the audience with technical details, but he also doesn't wish to taint the objective view of the audience as the look at his paintings.
"There is an opportunity for the public to come up with own narratives in your own head, even if you don't think it's what I thought it was. So you don't want to get in the way of that for the viewer," he said.
What is disclosed from the outside is the title of the show - Animism - and its two literal meanings. One is "the attribution of a soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena" and the other is "the belief in a supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe," according to the Oxford dictionary.
Assistant curator Maeve Hanna posed her initial theories about the paintings' themes.
"Delgado-Guevara described this body of work as his interpretation of his own interaction with inanimate objects where he has a tendency to anthropomorphize these objects, give them attributes more akin to those that humans have," Hanna said. "In this series we see prisms, flying, falling, floating and liberating themselves in the spirit of this notion of animism."
It will be in the spotlight of the Rustad Galleria until Aug. 17.
