The Full Stroy of Aaron's Art:

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Aaron Kraten

Ok, sit right back and let me tell you a little story about how even though there seems to be more so called artists around than ever before, there are a few that shout out and demand attention, sometimes, without saying a word. It is here that the power of the mind finds ways to make itself and how it “feels” immortal, expressing its importance and relevance through artifacts and abstract symbols and signs that eventually become a language. Aaron Kraten is avidly producing these artifacts that transmit the message of the partial unreality behind our generation. Not just the Hollywood mainstream fluff that turns the living into stone, but actually real and esthetically inclined art that stimulates one’s mind, body, and soul.
I have been in the art scene all of my life as my insane uncle ran a muck with his twisted paintings, forever leaving a surreal impression on my mental. In either case, ever since then I have been painting, hosting art shows, and writing about artists, so I guess I owe him a big thanks. I must say, in an art starved mainstream and overproduced glam epicenter, it was quite a treat to find Aaron Kraten, a pure artist. I first ran into his art work at a little art district behind the Orange Curtain in Costa Mesa. His art was being hung for a two day showing. I checked all of the artists out, but Aarons pieces struck my cranium like a 2 ton shell. They are a surreal and abstract mix of Indie, Industrial, Hip-hop, Techstep meets Voltron in a brand nameless era where faces don’t matter much…or so it seems. Graffiti meets Fashionclash with an eight-track player strapped to a faceless ear in the year 2030. He uproots robotic mega-stories about little vices that we create to make our lives more complex, yet pointless. His painting resemble television like abstractions that do not try as hard to perpetuate a false message, rather, let the audience reflect and form their own opinions. “I get my inspiration from watching people.” His glossy enameled art radiates with a supreme message of the summation of our time from the eyes of an outsider, an observer. Not just a rebellion, but a record for the archives of culture and life, not only in Southern California, but around the globe.
After seeing his art around LA and OC a few more times, I decided to run his work by the rest of the editorial crew and sure enough, we had a story waiting to happen. What can I do, I’ll E-mail him of course. After a few very short responses back and forth, we had an interview date set at the gallery where he is residing. I arrived at the 7 Degrees Gallery in Laguna Beach which has become the Mecca of fine arts in Southern California, literally saving it from a cultural deficit. I walked up to the front of the neo-beautiful industrial complex and was shown the way to Aaron’s gallery by a very elegant host. On my way to his personal gallery, I passed many other artists, but I must say, Aaron’s stood out the most. I could see his gallery and art hung from where I was walking and actually heard some observers marveling over his art and commenting on how you he is. I felt very eager and energized to meet the person behind this great art. I peaked my head in the gallery and there he was, head down looking at a piece of sticker paper he was drawing on. He was just doing his thing. He looked up and realized I had showed up, he was expecting me. After a very warm and respectful greeting, Aaron and I hit if off immediately. He is filled with so much vision and is not afraid to express it.
I was able to entice his life, actually, his art’s life story out of him and sure enough, after a little bit, he spilled the beans. Aaron started off as just another person working at a whatever job, a thrift store, just trying to pay rent, eat, and live pretty much. Noting that he worked in OC and there was not a whole lot of excitement amongst the superficial conservative androids zombying around town and well asleep by 10:00pm to start their 8-6 job routine. He was bored out of his mind. It was there in the absence of culture that Aaron unconsciously felt starved, suffocated. So one day, he started going through the trash at his work like any other normal fully employed person in Orange County and it hit him, why not use all of this for some art, but not like other multi-media , let me mix it up for fun and fame thing, no, Aaron needed something to do or else he was going to explode and die! The big bang or a new era began! The materials that he needed for his art mathematically and unconsciously manifested in his head and led him resources he could use to channel and express the mode of oppression he had been exposed to. He calls it “Devine trash digging.”
Aaron is just like any other down to earth person, being inspired by life and our environment. I asked him about his inspirations. He told me that he like all different types of music, from Brit-rock, Breakbeats, Jazz, Indie Rock, Hip-Hop, it is all inspiration to him. I must, I had to agree with him as he stated that “one of my favorite artists is Charles Mingus,” the great Jazz Bassist. His most recent endeavor is taking to the underground of the hip-hop culture where Aaron’s graph like art meets with its relatives, abstractions and signs upon random walls and media. Having held shows with DeeDee Ramone from the great NY band the Ramones (who actually passed away during their show together in New York) and collaborating with DJ Ron D Core and other artists, Aaron has made quite a name for himself. It wasn’t always that way for him, he worked hard at it, kept his word, and came through responsibly. He dug out old paint from the thrift store he worked in, wood panels, random plastic parts, vinyl records, and just about anything else that enhanced his peculiar style and was free. He organized these inanimate objects in a manner where they brought life to his pieced. Using only what he had to work with, he gives his art a synthetic glossy texture that makes a person feel immured in a glossy and still world where time really does stand still as the painting play. The integration of style, culture, robotics, music, love, and life are all themes that Aaron uses to stimulate your mind. His boss at the time Aaron was working at the thrift store (still unknowingly burgeoning his hidden talents) did not mind Aaron recycling his trash and in fact liked his art so much that he actually was the first person to ask Aaron to put his art up on the walls of the store, and thus, the birth of an artist into the real world manifested.
As Aaron was being urged by his peer to pursue his art, he was given a VW car door by a friend in hopes of inspiring Aaron to enter in a local contest. Aaron had entered in an art competition where the winner would get some money, not that much, but to a starving artist, that is everything, and the door was a collaboration of mad artistic fusion about to happen. Thank goodness that people still help culture and art out, or else we may never of had an Aaron. The contest required that you compose a painting within one hour, a difficult task needless to say. Aaron brought the car door and finished the painting in time, unfortunately his styles were too alien to ever be noticed for their genius, of course. His work was completely over looked. Aaron, being financially broke and let down, dragged his art piece, a heavy one I might add, back home (a little apartment that he would stretch a tarp out on an paint with what little room he had) and eventually hung it up at the thrift store. About a week after the contest, while working at the store, a person that had seen Aaron’s art hanging asked to buy the VW door and one other painting for $2000.00! This was Aaron’s first sale and he could not believe it. He thought the guy was just kidding, but the guy wrote the check and came back to pick up the art and yes, the check cleared. The gentleman who bought the car door and other painting owned a robotics and plastics factory. Captivated by how Aaron had expressed industrial and technological abstractions and tied them with a personal and artistic method. This gave Aaron the confidence and support to go out and try harder to get his work into galleries. “I would just walk into galleries with my paintings and the art dealers would look at me funny and ask me for my press-kit, I didn’t even know what a press-kit was.” Aaron is what he is, knowing it or not. A true artist that finds passion to produce and express how he feels. Finally, his work was accepted and immediately picked up by an eager audience.
Our Vespa riding under cover artist also contributed his art to publications such as OC Weekly in which his art was accepted as the cover piece. He is not trying to save the world, he is just another person like you and me, fighting the average routine. There are perhaps no super hero’s of our time that retain true dignity and respect, but are there Artists like Aaron have proved me wrong many times over. He has produced over 200 pieces in the last 4 years and is currently in his mid 20’s. The product of his “insane painting periods where I just crank them out, I don’t really think about why I do it, I just do.” He continues to help other artists gain recognition and experience by helping them display their work and motivating the public to take an introspective look at their lives and culture. The replication of ideology starts with art. Art paves the road for future perceptions of reality including scientific methodology. Our culture defines the rout in which we decide to partake in the decision making of our future. Allowing such artists as Aaron Kraten to infiltrate and display the redundancy of “normal” life is perhaps a poetic channel to radiate a simple reflection of one’s own life, immersed in a for ever changing culture, held in bondage to our plastic reality, shiny and glossy at first glance, but really just made of the same old stuff recycled over and over again, whatever it is. The music, art, and stories of life are what we are made of…He gave me the sticker he had been working on when I walked in. At first it was just a doodle on a blank piece of sticker paper, about half a page big, buy the time the interview was over, it had turned into a cool colorful piece stuck onto magnetic strip he had salvaged. A great individual it, was a pleasure.

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