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Bio / Artist Statement
Artist Statement:
Christopher Lloyd Tucker is a San Diego based multimedia artist who specializes in combining woodwork, metalwork, and digital art. Tucker thrives in situations that involve hands-on problem solving and exploring new materials, and his body of work reflects that, integrating new approaches and new media with each new phase of life.
While spending a great deal of his artistic career working in abstraction, Tucker has recently embraced more socially engaged versions of realism as a way of responding to our cultural moment. His latest body of work has been largely portrait based, relying on gestures and expressions as a vehicle for social commentary.
Tucker’s recent work has been an adaptation of digital drawing into three dimensions, with a thematic focus on the relationship of the human face and figure (and of marginalized and minoritized faces and figures in particular) to our current political and environmental reality.
His current body of work begins as digital sculptures that are then rendered and converted into more simplified vector images. They are laser cut from a collection of exotic hardwoods and/or multicolored acrylic sheets, and puzzled back together into a two-dimensional mosaic-like artwork, and framed in a hardwood.
BIO:
Hi! I'm Christopher Lloyd Tucker. I'm a San Diego based multimedia artist, and these days I specialize in woodwork, metalwork, and digital art. I had the good fortune to be born and raised in Chicago, by hippie parents, and in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the country. I started drawing in grade school, copying comic books.
When I was in my teens, I was lucky to receive a scholarship to an arts high school where I got access to a range of tools and approaches, and a community of artists and performers to be inspired by. After spending a few years there and then a year at an arts college, I ran into the hard reality that being an artist went a lot more smoothly if you came from money (which I did not). I ended up dropping out and finding ways to make a living in a way that were sort-of-art-adjacent. I was a jeweler's assistant, a freelance illustrator and designer, a sculpture teacher or assistant at various Chicago community centers. Those pursuits have allowed me to build up a broad range of skills that I’ve been able to use in my artistic and teaching practices. I eventually went back to school and finished with a degree in animation.
Since moving to San Diego I have been a member and instructor at MakerPlace, then at Maketory, local maker spaces which both, unfortunately closed. I have also become a Teaching Artist at A Reason To Survive, in National City, teaching digital media, woodworking and metalworking to high school students. I’ve had the opportunity to show my work all over Southern California, have a piece in the San Diego County collection, and am in the process of creating a Public Artwork in Encanto.