Nehemiah Cisneros ('21 Painting)
Fine Artist
Nehemiah, currently a fine arts graduate student at UCLA, creates exaggerations of people and life, using a graphic style inspired by pop culture, comics, and skate culture. Working at a large scale makes his narrative paintings almost cinematic. Nehemiah first paints a smaller sketch of his idea to compose the image and choose colors, then draws the final image onto a large canvas with charcoal, and paints layer by layer with oil, acrylic, and spray paint. Cisneros said he recalls photos of him drawing spiders at a young age and believes his early style remains present and thriving in his current work.
A piece of advice he passes down to young artists is that having talent is less than half of the battle. “It’s all in the hours that you put into something. At the end of the day, success comes from meeting deadlines, being humble, and not procrastinating.”
“In junior year, we were really encouraged to experiment, and because of my liberal arts classes I have a stronger sense of voice. In the past, my work was solely about visuals, now I’m concretely adding meaning to my art.”