Artist Erin D. Garcia Talks About His New “Paraiso” Collection with STADIUM

Stadium Goods Apparel

Artist Erin D. Garcia Talks About His New “Paraiso” Collection with STADIUM

We spoke to Garcia about his artistic evolution from musician to painter and his process going into designing the “Paraiso” collection.

Stadium Goods

STADIUM is excited to present its wide-ranging apparel collection with Los Angeles-based artist Erin D. Garcia dubbed “Paraiso.”

Titled and envisioned by Garcia, the 13-piece “Paraiso” collection has been a labor of love for both the artist as well as the STADIUM design team, and is meant to evoke sentiments of your own personal paradise to close out summer 2021 with positive vibes. Think of a tropical paradise filled with fruit, flora, and cool breezes, and you're on the “Paraiso” wavelength.

In celebration of the release, we spoke to Garcia about his background as a musician, his transition to visual art, and the pieces that inspired and became the “Paraiso” collection from STADIUM.

Before you were a painter by trade you were a musician. Can you talk a little more about your background in music?

My stepdad was a drummer, so I started playing music super young. I played drums in punk bands all through high school and also started DJing. Eventually I got into production. I moved to LA and really got into doing beats, and started a group called Brother Reade with a friend of mine that I grew up with. We were signed to a subsidiary of Warner Bros. and made music together for a long time. I was also in a couple other bands in LA, Saber Tooth Tiger and an electronic psych band called ESP.

When did you start painting? When did that become your focus?

I was always drawing throughout my life, and it was something that I knew that I was going to focus on later on. When I was doing all the music production stuff, my down time was spent drawing and painting. With production you’re in front of the computer all day in the studio. I was doing a lot of commercial production, so my escape from all of that was drawing.

I was invited to be in a few group shows by a now closed gallery in Highland Park called THIS Gallery. They did a friends and family group show every year. I did a few of those and then they asked if I wanted to do a solo show. I did the solo show and right after that I got another show in San Francisco. I got my first big mural soon after and at the same time my band ESP broke up. It all happened around the same time. I always knew I was going to follow a painting path and eventually everything just kind of fell into place at the right time for me to be like, “OK, I have these shows, I have these murals, I'm learning how to do all this other stuff and I don't have a band anymore.” The opportunities shifted into doing artwork, and it was the most exciting thing for me to do.

Where was your first major mural?

The first large one was at the Ace Hotel [in Palm Springs]. I had never painted anything a quarter of that size before. They have this large brick wall outside by the swimming pool. I was approached by Junk Magazine, they were curating the wall and asked if I wanted to do it. I had zero experience painting that big. So I got an assistant who had assisted on big murals before as a safety net in case I totally messed it up. Between the shows in 2012 and that mural, that was the foundation everything else is built on.

So, the shift to mural work was not intentional necessarily.

No, it was something that I'd always wanted to do. I grew up super into graffiti. I never did it in a real way, but I was a big fan. Me and my friends would drive up from North Carolina to New York and buy as many graffiti magazines as we could. So large-scale was something that I was always super interested in.

How did you arrive at the style of some of your large-scale work, with the abstract shapes?

The stuff that I was drawing before my solo show or even before the group shows was way more illustrative and detailed, and I got tired of it. I kind of stopped drawing in that style for a couple of years. I was visiting my mom in Boulder and I found this book, it was an exhibition catalogue of minimalist work from the collection of the Guggenheim. It totally opened my mind to what artwork could be. I started drawing again, but I was just drawing these lines that build themselves into structures. And I just kept kind of running along that path. They went from drawings to watercolor pieces. That first mural was actually a nice step because I realized that instead of everything being connected, I could pull them apart so they became these looser structures. Eventually I was like, “Oh if I can pull them apart as individual sections, then I can explode them even further to their most minimal forms,” which is just single lines and curved lines. I've been working off of that simplified pallet of elements ever since.

There’s a great deal of nuance and precision in the brush work. What role does that detail play in your work?

It just feels like the natural way to draw these things. It’s the best way to express the feeling of what the lines are, these thought out strokes. Flat color is flat color, and if I'm doing it with a roller or with the brush, it's really about controlling the edges. But the gradients are a different beast. With the gradients, you get a full feeling of movement because, as you're pulling the paint, like as you're pulling a curve, if there’s any variation in your hand, then you get these little wiggles, little distortions that you can follow because paint records everything. The detail really comes in with the gradient work. Especially on the bigger pieces ‘cause it's all about pulling them as smooth as possible. Because it translates to the viewer, you can sense that type of focus and smoothness. If you just pulled it rough and you have all these blurry distorted bits, the piece reads totally different. There's no more tranquil feeling than when you can get a really nice gradient.

What was the inspiration for the work that became the Paraiso collection?

I've been working on still lifes for the past couple of years. Just trying to figure them out and get them to a place where I feel really comfortable. In 2018 I showed my first still life pieces. Half the show was abstract gradient work, and the other half was still lifes. And I really struggled to get all the still lifes done in a way that I felt that they were strong enough to show everybody. And so, ever since then, I've just been going back to the idea to figure out like, “OK, how do you do this?” If you paint a flower then what do the leaves look like? And then if that's how the leaves look, then what do the stems look like? If you paint a vase, what would a vase look like? So it's just this kind of game where you get to keep chasing it down. You're chasing the world that you're creating.

So, at the beginning of Paraiso, I was already in a phase of digging further into all this objective work. I wanted the collection to reflect what I was working on in the same way. I wasn't approaching it like, “Oh I'm going to do some T-shirt designs.” I was thinking of it as a body of work. I’m going to put the same attention to detail, the same research, as if it were a solo show—I’m just going to treat it exactly the same.

Does transferring your work to apparel change its meeting?

I don't know if it changes its meaning at all. If you go off the concept of it being built as a body of work, as you normally would—I guess it changes how it's read. It's something that you're supposed to wear, it's supposed to live out in the world for other people to see in a way that it's not in a gallery, which I actually really like. I think it feels different but it doesn't change the meaning of it at all. The impact is different, the way you view it, but the way you take it in the meaning stays the same any way you would view it.

The Erin D. Garcia x STADIUM Paraiso collection is available now exclusively at StadiumGoods.com. You can also view the full lookbook here.