Hugo Crosthwaite with HereIn

Tijuana Bible, 2010, charcoal on wall, 15 x 25 ft.

[Image description: In a black-and-white photograph, a man in a fedora paints a mural on a white wall, which depicts a collage of images of individuals—some wearing the armor of warriors, others huddled together before a black backdrop, their faces expressive and detailed.]

Hugo Crosthwaite is a storyteller at heart. Through his drawings, which range from intimate, black-and-white ink sketches to large-scale, charcoal murals, Crosthwaite closely studies the everyday. Much of his work reflects both on his formative years in Rosarito, Baja California—a city just 10 miles south of the international border—as well as his adult life, which he’s spent straddling the U.S./Mexico border. Whether his drawings layer together comic book figures and surreal mythological images or capture the way the light strikes the expression on an overworked mother’s face as she walks home from work, carrying her child on her back, Crosthwaite’s diverse body of work excels in its diligent attention to detail. 

His most recent exhibition, Caravan, on view at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles—featuring paintings, sculpture, and video art—considers the experiences of migrants making the treacherous journey to the border in search of the American Dream. However, the 2021 recipient of the San Diego Art Prize has been mining this topic for years. From his 2010 solo exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art, titled A Tail of Two Cities, to his stop-motion animation for 2021 The Color Forty Nine single, “What Would I know? / ¿Yo Que Sé?” the content of Crosthwaite’s art seems constantly to return to quiet Rosarito park benches, crowded Tijuana streets, and humble taco stands in San Diego. 

In his conversation with HereIn Contributing Editor Justin Duyao, Crosthwaite explored his earliest encounters with the magic of drawing, his affinity for improvisation, and his work’s precarious relationship with time.

HereIn: The first question I wanted to ask you is about what seems to be an essential quality of your drawings. I’ve noticed your work is intimately observational—I can tell you pay a lot of attention to the people, places, and things around you, so I wanted to ask: Where did you learn this skill? Has this been a way that you’ve always moved through the world? 

Hugo Crosthwaite: It’s pretty much the way I taught myself how to draw. The basis of my practice is my sketchbook. All my recent work has been informed by the drawing that I do in my sketchbook, which is a moleskin—those small little sketchbooks. In 2009, I started to go out and just draw people. I started this in Brooklyn, New York, where I would sit at the subway stop and practice life drawing.  When I came back to Mexico from Brooklyn in 2013, I started to go to downtown Tijuana near the cathedral to sit down and start drawing the feeling, the aesthetic of the city and its inhabitants. I would sit down with my ballpoint pen and try my best to capture faces and facades. It’s never been about drawing in a Renaissance way, capturing “a window into reality,” but just a sense and feeling of that environment.

My drawing is very improvisational. Even though I’m a figurative artist, I never really learned how to draw in a formal, academic way, what is referred to as “Measured drawing,” something very precise and deliberate. My drawing, like I mentioned, is very improvisational. It’s about drawing details and stringing them together, conceiving a visual narrative that is being formed as I’m creating a drawing. 

Somebody comes by, and I see an interesting face, and I try to incorporate that face into the environment, so that I’m forming these improvised narratives—all in my sketchbook—so that in the end they aren’t just sketches, they’re like little poems that come alive on the page, you know?

Ensueño No. 1, 2020, ink and acrylic on paper, 14 x 18 in.

[Image description: Before a faded black-and-white facade depicting cartoon characters, a person’s body emerges from a box, below which dangle two exposed legs.]

HereIn: Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. You’ve said before that you feel that, in your work, you compose narratives just like a writer might write a poem. What is it about improvisation and spontaneity that inspires you? Do those elements ever take your work in a surprising direction?

Crosthwaite: This improvisational aspect of my work, it’s always been with me. That’s the way I started out. I never formally studied drawing techniques, but I’ve been drawing since I was a kid. When I was growing up, I worked in my father’s curio shop in Rosarito Beach, waiting for American tourists to come in and buy kitschy artifacts and souvenirs. In those moments when we were waiting and not doing anything, I would draw on pieces of paper. It was always a game that I would play with my brother—we would have a sheet of paper on the counter, and I would start drawing spaceships on one side, and my brother would draw something else on the other, and we would confront each other. We would create these battle scenes as we were drawing.

So I’d draw a laser fire that would go across the page, and on the other side of the page, when it gets there, you decide what happens. Did it hit? Is there an explosion? That kind of stringing along of things, where you’re drawing something and you’re making it up as you go along on a sheet of paper, that was something that I started doing when I was five or six years old. Always with my brother.

That stayed with me, this idea of improvising something on the page. That’s why, at some point, when I started studying graphic design and took some painting and drawing courses at San Diego State University, I never could understand the process of drawing something in a very formal way. You know, the academic way of drawing, which starts with very basic, geometric shapes. The detail is the last thing you draw. That was completely foreign to my process. The way I taught myself to draw was the opposite of that—to draw details and then string enough of them together to form an image.

Ensueño No. 8, 2020, ink and acrylic on paper, 14 x 18 in.

[Image description: In a black-and-white artwork, elements of several images appear collaged together. On one side, a cartoonish animal face is grafted onto a more realistically sketched torso. In another, a woman carries what seems to be a tool over her shoulder.]

If you’ve ever seen me draw, I always start with an eye. And it’s always a finished eye. I draw an eye to its completion. And then I draw another eye and a nose. All my drawings, finished or not, are composed of completed details that “happen” on the page. Finishing a piece is about following those details where they lead me, in order to create a narrative. That’s why I’m attracted to the idea of drawing as poetry. That came about while talking to other artists in Tijuana, where they would tell me about their processes and how they work. It was very foreign to me, how traditional, figurative painters worked. 

But when I got an opportunity to talk to poets, who would say, “It’s all about the individual words. Words are images, so stringing words together creates a poem as a succession of images and feelings.” When I heard that, that spoke to me directly and completely. That’s exactly the way I work, too. I don’t work like a painter or a typical visual artist. I think about my drawing like a poet thinks about poetry. 

Shattered Mural, 2015, installation, acrylic on wood, dimensions variable

[Image description: On a concrete surface, shards of sketched images are arranged haphazardly, with each image focused on a one or two faces. In one, a person holds their hand to their mouth while they think. In another, a person’s face is brightly illuminated, their eyes wide with fear.]

HereIn: I’m curious, how do you know that a drawing is working? How do you know, in the moment, it’s achieving the effect that you want? Are there drawings sometimes that you’ll start and then give up on, because it doesn’t capture what you’d meant to capture? 

Crosthwaite: That’s the thing, I’m always drawing details that I love. You can never truly make a mistake when you’re doing that kind of work. If something’s not working, you can black that out, go over it with white, and make it something else—incorporate another detail that you love. That’s why there’s no discarded drawings, in a way. There are no mistakes. You’re always working with and around mistakes, until you reach a conclusion. There’s always going to be something that you love.

It’s just like a jazz musician plays a flurry of notes that they’re improvising, and you don’t really make mistakes, because you know how to weave detail into the story you’re telling. Really, you follow the details where they take you, and you keep going until you get the sense that the narrative has come together and doesn’t need anything else. 

In Memoriam Mural Performance: Cuenca Ecuador, 2017, acrylic on wall, 8 x 34 ft.

[Image description: A photograph depicts a man bent over, listening to music while he paints the details of a face on a white wall. To his right, a completed half of the completed mural looms over him.]

HereIn: The best jazz musicians never play a “wrong” note; and even if they do, if their instrument squeaks, they play with it, they make art with it. For them, improvisation is a playful and generative space where anything can happen. 

I’ve noticed that your practice is very rooted in time. You’ve said about your site-specific work, specifically, that you’re drawn to the fact that they tend to have short lifespans. Can you reflect on your relationship to the impermanence of art? 

Crosthwaite: Because I work in improvisation, I don’t have preparatory sketches. Nothing is ever planned. It’s about me going to a site and working. Nobody, especially when it comes to murals, is going to give you a wall if they don’t know exactly what you’re going to paint. They require sketches. They don’t want any surprises. So I’ve never been properly commissioned to do a mural—I’m usually asked to complete work in tandem with an exhibition, where they need something from me in two weeks, and I don’t have any work, so I propose a mural. That way, I have the freedom to go to a space and to improvise.

This started in Brooklyn at some point when I didn’t have any work, but I had the ability to draw. So I’d go to a space and improvise a mural without worrying about subject matter. In the end, it didn’t matter, because I was going to be erased once finished. There was no commitment. Once I started doing these, I realized that they could be something like a performance. As an artist, having this very heavy history of Mexican muralism behind me—[David Alfaro] Siqueiros and [Diego] Rivera—I decided I wanted to play with the idea of being the first Mexican muralist who treats murals as a public performance, where I go into a space with nothing prepared, and I wear a shirt that says “Rótulos,” which means “sign painter.” 

So I wear this work shirt, and I start working and improvising a visual narrative in public. In a way the wall becomes a stage and I’m in front of that wall wearing a costume that asks the question, “Am I the artist? Or am I somebody hired by the artist to do this mural?” I take on this persona of someone weaving a story on a wall, and at the end of two weeks, like any time based performance, it would have an ending. Just like silence would follow a musical performance, in the last week I would start deconstructing the mural by painting little white squares. Slowly deconstructing the organic, improvised narrative on the wall. At the end of the performance the mural is gone. It becomes just a memory to the public.

This process of creating a mural and then erasing it, I called it “deconstruction” and later on somebody mentioned to me, “Hugo, that’s an activity that poets do.” This term of deconstruction was something that Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer, would do with his poetry. He would start separating and isolating the words in a poem to study the visuals and meanings contained within each word. He would call that “deconstructing”—that’s exactly what I wanted to do with these murals by erasing parts of it with white squares. Those details, as they become isolated within the grid that I’m painting, become more abstract, the original intention shifts and slowly disapears.

HereIn: It sounds like the work evolves, even as it disappears. It becomes something else, creates a completely different effect in the world. Every day, it changes shape and form, which completely pushes against how we understand “murals” or “monuments” as permanent installations that memorialize something. Your work seems to honor the fact that things change and life changes. That’s beautiful.

Crosthwaite: Well put.

CARAVAN, 2023, installation with ceramic and wood bases, dimensions variable

[Image description: On tall wooden pedestals, cylindrical ceramic figures are arranged like people in a crowd, the faces of individuals young and old sketched directly onto them in pencil.]

HereIn: I wanted to ask you one more question—and this is completely in a different direction. I would love to hear a little bit more about you. What are you excited about? What are you working on? 

Crosthwaite: I recently started working with ceramics. I just opened a show at Luis De Jesus in Los Angeles with a ceramic installation that’s titled Caravan. It’s the first time I’ve ever ventured into this, and I’m really excited about it. I’ve been crafting these small ceramic figures and drawing faces of migrants on them. Exploring how the term “caravan” has been politicized. In American politics, there seems to be this notion that it only takes two or three migrants at the border to make a caravan.

How politicians and the media took this word, this image of people traveling together for safety, and made it into a term more similar to “horde.” There are even conspiracy theories behind it that suggest caravans of migrants have been funded by foreign monies or something like that. All of these concepts were interesting to me, so I decided to do this room size installation of a caravan of ceramic figures.

I’m excited about working in this new medium, it’s something that I’d like to continue, to try to learn this process. Ceramics are very beautiful to draw on, you know. I’ve been working on these figures that go through the first burn. And on top of that, I draw with pencil. The ceramic picks up the pencil beautifully. It’s a wonderful medium for me to expand my drawing practice.

I’ve also been working on stop-motion drawing animations, which I’m very excited about. This process of working in animation and showing how I create a drawing, this improvisation of a narrative on a page, has been a process that allows me to show the viewer how I think and feel, how I create a drawing. The viewer is  able to see the excitement of an improvised drawing as it progresses on a page and moves on its own. I get very excited about this process.

This conversation has been edited by HereIn for length and clarity.