by Maria DeBlassie
Daily Lobo
Chris Uphues' favorite thing at the Frontier Restaurant is the sweet roll.
"That thing is a killer," Uphues said. "It totally sent me on a sugar high and flipped me out."
Uphues, a Chicago artist, was in Albuquerque doing a series of lithography prints for the Tamarind Institute.
He said he also went to Spring Crawl when he was in Albuquerque and spent a lot of time at Winnings Coffee House.
His favorite thing about New Mexico is that the people are so friendly and laid-back, he said.
The Tamarind Institute, part of UNM's College of Fine Arts, is one of country's premier lithography presses, Uphues said. It is near the Frontier Restaurant. He was invited to do a series of lithography prints after people from the institute saw one of his Chicago shows.
Lithography is a drawing-based form of printmaking in which an image drawn on a stone or metal plate is transferred to paper.
He said it was his first time doing lithography, but he plans to do it again this summer in Chicago.
"It was an awesome experience," Uphues said. "The people at Tamarind were great."
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He said he works primarily in painting and drawing.
"My artwork is based on popular art, folk art objects and relates to graffiti, video games, animation and comics," Uphues said. "Those are the things that really influenced me."
He said he discovered his artistic style one day at the park.
"It was raining out," Uphues said. "I was totally bummed out, and I remember looking up and seeing all these tree branches. All of a sudden all those branches started forming pictures."
He said he started his work by making completely abstract images and then finding pictures within those shapes.
"It's like a big, dense ball of images," he said.
He listed Barry McGee and Japanese artist Takashi Murakami as artists who inspired him.
He said he walked the UNM campus to see the Bruce Nauman installation, "Center of the Universe."
He admired Nauman because the artist was able to move to the desert and still be a big-name artist, he said.
He also likes the art of the late Taos-based artist Agnes Martin, whose simple, sparse pieces contrast his own busy, dense artwork, he said.
The Tamarind Institute is making editions of his prints, and people can see them by going to the gallery and asking to view them.
Uphues said once the editions are done, they will be in shows all over the world in places such as Alabama, New York and St. Petersburg, Russia.
His advice to emerging artists is to have the willpower to succeed.
"If you really want to be an artist, you've got to want it like a guy whose head is on fire wants a bucket of water," he said.
