Californian puts his art on the line

Out of his passion for names, Aaron De La Cruz has made a name for himself.

The urban artist first got interested in art as a child when his brother "drew a huge Batman logo on the side of a freeway and put our name inside it, ‘De La Cruz.’ When I saw that I was immediately turned on to the fact that you could put your name on something," he said.

De La Cruz, whose work is on display at Loft in Space in Kakaako, started doing graffiti himself, sneaking out of his Fresno, Calif., home in the early hours to "write my name over and over and over" on any open wall he could find. He even found a way to make money out of it, charging friends $5 to create artistic renditions of their names on backpacks and other items. But eventually the concentration on names, and specifically the letters themselves, began to get tedious.

"As a graffiti artist you tend to go through a few names at one time," he said. "I kind of got tired of the idea of being kind of stuck to this name. I had to write these four letters, these five letters, over and over. So what I started doing actually was ‘decomposing’ the letters."

He would break down a letter into its individual lines and curves, repositioning them to create stark line designs. A "T," for example, might be broken into two lines, with one line turned 90 degrees to create parallel lines. "So to me I’m still seeing a T … it’s just being shown in a different format," he said.

De La Cruz trained himself to repeat the lines and curves with remarkable precision, creating works that he describes as "a mixture between design and pattern." His work appears precise enough to have been done with a stencil, yet it’s all done freehand.

"Let’s say I do a line from here to here," he said, placing his hands at shoulder width. "I’ll know how far I went — let’s say I went for one second and stopped — then maybe six feet down. I’ll know I did that move, and I’ll repeat that same move."

That repetition creates an almost hypnotic clash of lines, with the eye alternating focus between line and background.

De La Cruz calls it "an exercise in pushing and pulling of positive and negative space and the relationship between line weight."

IF THAT sounds somewhat academic for a graffiti artist, that’s because De La Cruz studied at the California Academy of Arts and Crafts in Berkeley on a scholarship, majoring in illustration. Predictably, he butted heads with his instructors, who didn’t understand how his work could be used to illustrate a story, he said.

"There were times when I questioned the major that I took, but I think I went with my gut and stuck it out," he said.

He persisted in his work during and after graduation, putting on some shows in the Bay Area, making posters for a nonprofit group and teaching art. Clothing designers began to put his work on their products, and his big break came three years ago when New York-based DJ Clark Kent, who has become something of a style guru for sneakers, saw a pair of shoes adorned with a De La Cruz design.

"That led to me going to New York. We did a shoe together … and from there little things began to open up more and more," said De La Cruz, who recently did a show in Peru and will do another in New York after finishing his Honolulu display.

De La Cruz acknowledges the illegal aspects of his early graffiti days but said he did it mostly because he was interested in art and was trying to compete with his brother. "I always wanted to draw straight lines better than him without using a ruler and be faster than him," he said.

In addition, doing graffiti gave him some credibility in Fresno’s gang culture without him having to become fully involved in it. "I got along with everybody," he said.

The installation at Loft in Space is titled "Long Walk Home" and in some ways is a retrospective on his life. It features his recent work as well as a re-creation of his bedroom from his early years in Fresno covered with his graffiti stylings of that era.

"My parents tried as hard as they could to keep me in the house," said De La Cruz, who just turned 31 and lives in San Francisco. "But … I had good grades, and I wasn’t doing as bad as my friends who were involved in drugs and gangs and all this other stuff, so they were like, ‘OK, if you get in trouble then maybe that’ll be it, but obviously you’re doing something right — wrong, but in the right way.’"