The Art of Paul Sierra.

"Donor" oil on canvas

Via: Oakton Community College Art Museum

"Cuban-born Paul Sierra has lived most of his life in the U.S., but his Latin roots are artistically and emotionally intertwined with influences from North American art and culture. Sierra perceives art as a tool to transform the chaos of his life as an immigrant into a positive vision. This exhibition features Sierra’s recent paintings of violent car accidents, with wreckages framed in luminous landscapes absent of human figures.

Sierra's paintings are included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C., Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL, Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, McCormick Place, Public Art Collection, Chicago, IL, and more."

Via: Des Plains Times

"I, like most people, had a small car accident; nothing that broke too many of my bones," Sierra reported. "But it seemed to me that it was so sudden. My mind was on something else or I was talking to the driver, and all of a sudden, 'Bang,' there it was. It could have been the end.

"We make our cars our second home: our phone, our music, little gadgets for a nice smell, the works. You mention it, we have it," Sierra continued. "We feel safe at home but the truth is we are not. It happens any moment, even when you are going to your mother-in-law's or a vacation in the most beautiful places. This brings me to one of my obsessions: How easy to break is life."

Sierra compared car accidents to a war because there's no reasoning behind who becomes a fatality. "That is what life is all about for me," Sierra said, adding with a hearty laugh, "I'm a pessimist."

When Sierra started working on the series, he searched the Internet for images of car accidents, and the number of sites he found shocked him. He was also startled to discover that, because cars are made out of plastic, after a serious accident they no longer look like cars. "Sometimes, to have an image for a painting, I have to combine several photographs in order for it to appear that it's a car," the artist revealed.

Sierra never includes dead bodies in his "Wrecked" paintings. "If I show the bodies, it becomes morbid and people would just zoom into that part of the tragedy. I want the viewer to say, 'That could be me.'"