Website: damiengonzales.com

Damien is a self-taught artist whose appreciates the dramatic terrain and weather that make the Southwest extraordinarily beautiful and unique. New Mexico is well known for some of the most inspiring and frequently represented artistic subject matter used by artists, past and present, ranging from stark dry desert landscapes to high snow covered alpine peaks. The region's famous art communities and long artistic history help make this an ideal location for an artist.

Damien aspires to paint full time. He finds tremendous support and inspiration from other local artists. His main interest in landscape painting springs from his desire to convey his appreciation of the natural surroundings and his early exposure to the works of many great landscapists including Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, Edgar Payne, Wilson Hurley, Robert Lougheed, Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida and others. Though the bold and direct painting styles typically found in southwestern landscape painting lend themselves well to the area's rugged subject matter, Damien is also strongly influenced by more impressionistic and less direct painting approaches common in other parts of the country and the world.

Damien works as a design engineer and his technical background is applied to evey painting. His attention to compostion, values, and color merge with the feeling and emotion that he tries to evoke in each piece.
Since September of 2009 he has focused primarily on plein air work, which he finds the most challenging and rewarding.