Bio
Born in 2000 in San Jose, California, and raised in Latin America, Luka Amaru Fernandez is a self-taught artist based in San Francisco specializing in two dimensional media. His work is liminal and enigmatic, and explores themes of animality, synesthesia, ambiguous identities, magical realism, and the sublime. He works as an art teacher at Art School of SF Bay and facilitates events at Queer Arts Featured.
Ranging in medium from watercolor and ink to pastels and oil paint, Luka Amaru Fernandez is dedicated to exploring what it means to be a traditional picture maker in a world where images can be conjured up at the typing of a prompt and press of a button. His practice is based on his experience with ambiguity in racial and gender identity - fantastical places, magical realism, bright colors and spiritual notions are recurring themes that highlight a tangled history and nuanced relationship to spirituality and selfhood. Animals have been a part of their art since childhood, leading zoomorphic entities to populate their imagined worlds as beings that simultaneously evoke otherness and ask empathy from the viewer. For Fernandez, painting and drawing are a personal research project to find how he can weave these nuanced threads into a single image, by both imparting a fragment of his experience and leaving enough space for the viewer to see a part of themselves reflected back.
Selected Work
