Justin Lovato & The Atomic Soup of the Natural Universe

“All that graffiti stuff lasted well into and after high school. It was freeing. I felt like I discovered a secret world that happened below the surface. Some of my best early memories are finding chill spots to go paint with friends as a teenager,” says Lovato.

From age eighteen and beyond, his sensibilities grew increasingly complex. Characters entered his images, as well as landscape and muted blocks of color. (The latter feature was created with materials sourced from the “oops” paint can pile at local hardware stores.) These characters were works on paper that expressed Lovato’s interest in fringe subjects, symbolism, and esoteric history. The sophisticated use of color had not yet quite developed. Rather, in these drawings, the viewer finds, Lovato the draughtsman. Line predominates with a few, blocky instances of color. Alchemical symbols and enchanted shamanic characters hint at the deep dive into the “unmoving realm” that dominates his practice today.

My art has always tried to illustrate the spiritual world leaking into the material world. Two worlds effect and play off each other.”

Once he moved to landscape, those drawings’ nascent themes coalesced into something more refined. The trees and fields that provided a crude, often just-hinted-at setting served to displaced the shamanic characters and began interacting with the blocks of color. The comic-book type narrative focusing on conjurers and the second-sighted withered away as he became more enveloped in his current style—an investigation into the delicate balance between order and chaos that girds out reality.

“My art has always tried to illustrate the spiritual world leaking into the material world. Two worlds affect and play off each other. That’s what my recent art is really about, too. When I look at my work, I see that ethereal world as a substrate or lattice. When I see patterns in nature it looks like the world is growing out of that spiritual perfection and into matter. I try to capture a sliver of that overwhelming complexity and mystery in my work,” he says.

Lovato’s first foray into his current, trippy-nature mood were a tad basic. The primitive, cartoonish qualities of his drawings faded as the truth and purity of landscape drew him closer. With landscape, he found comfort as the artworks assimilated his own surroundings and experiences. The work became increasingly personal, demanding more of his own narrative.

Melding his personal story with the endless variations present in nature fills him with gratitude. Merging these personal—universal stories with the wyrd or fated, his incomprehensible tessellations express, for Lovato, transcendental thoughts that could never be confined in the shabby clothes of human speech.

“These paintings try to radiate some kind of good into the world,” he says. “Art, in general, is an opportunity to escape into another reality. There’s truly mystical and universal experiences to tap into when you get a few days out into wilderness. It’s visceral. I want to bring those intuitively obvious realizations into my art through landscapes.”

The process to create the tessellated landscapes begins in nature. The woodsy scenes that comprise his compositions are largely taken from what he has found on his travels around North America. Any vista that surprises him as alien or unique becomes fodder for a future painting.

Of late, those inspirational regions are found right outside his front door. Lovato lives with his fiancée on a couple acres in some secluded and (appropriately) unincorporated woodsy region of western Washington state. The wind sings through the trees, while birds chirp along. Life is invigorating, and the solitude makes it easy to concentrate on his work.

I usually won’t make a landscape unless I’ve been there myself to take reference shots, and have fully experienced what it’s like to be somewhere…”

“I love America and its landscapes —I never get bored of the variety of country. I usually won’t make a landscape unless I’ve been there myself to take reference shots, and have fully experienced what it’s like to be somewhere,” he says.

Once Lovato has a subject in mind, the process becomes painstaking. The media is fairly traditional—acrylic on canvas, linen, or wood, depending on the desired effect. (Drawings were and are done with Micron Sepia and Stonehenge paper.)

An initial painting covers the canvas. That first painting is, itself, covered by masking. A pattern is cut into the masking and half the cover is removed. The exposed painting is covered over as Lovato sees fit. When that process feels complete, Lovato removes the other half of the masking and the composition is complete.

Lovato describes the process as creating a “chromatic vibration through the discord of contrasting images.” The discrete and contrasting paintings he makes on a single canvas hum together as a single and coherent entity. The colors, he believes, vibrate visually. They become two sound waves that make an interference pattern. Their differences unite them and all semblance of disunity bleeds away and leaves behind their hallowed concurrence. They become a universal constant. They shift from conflict to mere existence.

Lovato says, “The process of working through a piece and seeing a big effort crystalize is its own reward. This work requires a lot of alone time. Which is fine, since I think I lean towards being a bit of a hermit, or at least finding joy in all the solitude.