I underwent a whole process of slowly letting go of idiosyncrasies and habits and embellishments and everything extraneous to the essentials that I'm unwilling to let go of. I never dreamed that I would be making black-and-white paintings with so little embellishment. But it's been liberating in many ways to let go of that and yet see what I did want to retain.

Caio Fonseca

Categorized in : Letting Go Habit Painting

When I have a creative block, I take walks. I like to see what shapes stick out - so many legs rushing by at once, it can seem abstract. I don't need to see great art to get stirred up. Music does that for me more easily.

Caio Fonseca

rushing block art

I try not to bring in anything I don't love looking at. It's about restaint ... There is something about an unfinished quality that leaves within you that sense of possibility.

Caio Fonseca

possibility quality trying

It's not until the very last phase that you know how good the works are going to be.

Caio Fonseca

phases know-how lasts

I've been playing piano my whole life but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand. I don't have professional pretensions. I've learned so much. So many things I've been doing in the visual, two-dimensional painting world parallel many of the inner working of music - how intervals resolve into each other, harmonic rhythm, tonal things - there's a whole vocabulary that overlaps. Sometimes people see pianos in my works - that I never think.

Caio Fonseca

trying people thinking

Most days, I practice piano in the mornings and I spend the rest of the day painting.

Caio Fonseca

piano practice morning

My 20s were spent in a room, alone, mixing paints and figuring it all out.

Caio Fonseca

mixing paint rooms

I'm not such an artist type that I can't handle the real world. I read the financial pages, because most people don't talk about art.

Caio Fonseca

real people art

This morning I got up early and I was glazing the paintings and they just looked so beautiful. I had a private moment of "yeah, I'm behind this." Which is all that matters as an artist, to believe in what you're doing. It sounds like an obvious thing but it takes a lot of work.

Caio Fonseca

morning beautiful believe

My uniform is sweatpants, so crusted over with dried paint that they're as hard as a table. I wear T-shirts that are also covered in paint, and Crocs.

Caio Fonseca

uniforms t-shirt tables

My forms are not abstractions of things in the real world. They're also not symbols. I would say that my job is to invent these forms and to put them together in a way that keeps your interest, to give the forms a quirky identity so you can engage with them, so you realize there's an inner intelligence or logic.

Caio Fonseca

real jobs giving

Most people draw from the mind, not the eye. They draw the idea of a table or a face, not what's in front of them. We don't actually see the line of the jaw as a line and we don't see an eye as a perfectly outlined almond shape.

Caio Fonseca

eye people ideas

For me becoming a painter was an Everest, in terms of what I thought a painter was. There are many roads to becoming an artist. For me it wasn't art school. I didn't have that go to art school and then get a gallery. It's more like, how deep is your inner library to cull from. It's certainly not about technical prowess, just about depth of investigation. It takes time. I had 15 years of painting under my belt before my first New York show. I was glad to have that. It's a good thing to spend your twenties getting your craft.

Caio Fonseca

library art school

If you come every day or every month to my studio, you won't see that much change, but if you come once a year, you'll see big new categories opened up.

Caio Fonseca

bigs months years

I've been playing piano my whole life, but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made, really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand.

Caio Fonseca

painting piano trying

I'm not particularly interested in painting, per se. I'm interested in a painting that has that mysterious life to it. Anything that doesn't partake of that magic is halfway dead - it returns to its physical elements, it's just paint and canvas.

Caio Fonseca

mysterious-life elements magic

I was never exposed to art school. I grew up in an artist's studio. I was exposed a lot of studio time between of my father and a great painter I studied with in Barcelona. That was my art school, as Europe was.

Caio Fonseca

father art school

I think I was very lucky to have grown up with an artist's studio in the house. It was a kind of life that was possible. Yeah, it made it kind of harder because the standards were higher, but there was no pressure.

Caio Fonseca

artist house thinking

All my siblings became artists. One's a novelist, my brother is a painter, my sister was a costume designer.

Caio Fonseca

sibling artist brother

So many paintings have hidden meanings or need wall texts, but my work is not in that category.

Caio Fonseca

painting wall needs

Everyone accepts the abstraction of Bach. My work aspires to the same kind of abstraction, which is so engaging that you're distracted from asking about what it means. So many paintings have hidden meanings or need wall texts, but my work is not in that category. Once it's in the viewer's eyes my job will be judged on whether or not it is engaging and pulls you in to a kind of intelligence or poetic something going on there that makes it sustainable to look at.

Caio Fonseca

wall eye mean