Subject: The Daily Times Interview
Date: Sun, 05 Dec 2004 05:54:59 -0500

Bleier: Tell us about your art, Joe.

Archuleta: Sure Rick. I make depictions of ordinary objects and everyday people. They come out looking the way they do because they've passed through a filter on the way to realization on the panel. Light waves bounce off a still life, contact my retina, filter through my "self", and result in the pieces I make. It's what I consider the basis of Art. Individual representation. van Eyck, Renoir, Egon Schiele, Chuck Close and Picasso all have different ways of interpreting what we all see. And this is Art.

Bleier: And what of Non-Objective work? Conceptualism, and Dada?

Archuleta: It's great. It's necessary. It can be perfect and is indispensable. But as for my...station or whatever, I'm not interested in art that requires laborious explanation to participate in. My art is direct, immediate. There isn't anything to it other than what you see.

Bleier: Which is exactly what, by the way?

Archuleta: Exactly the way I feel. My art looks the way I feel. Maybe it is the way I am. I don't know, because I don't think about things when I work. I just make marks and hopefully permit it to come out the way it will. >

Bleier: As if it's other than a series of conscious decisions?

Archuleta: It's intuitive in that rational thinking never enters the arena. When I try to direct what I'm doing I break out of the process and falter. I suppose I would aim to relay communication of feeling. My art is meant as an entirely emotive offering, if there is any meaning at all. But I never devise an intentional affect. There is no receiver, to me, theoretically. I don't make art "for".

Bleier: Why do you make art?

Archuleta: Because I have to. There isn't an alternative. The artist John van Means says about his work, "If I could explain it, I wouldn't have to create it." Art communicates what can only be expressed by art. The images speak for themselves because there were no other means that could do so effectively. And I don't have anything to say to people. It's an internal dialogue or one that's between myself and the artwork.

Bleier: Is it a successful exchange?

Archuleta: The art is created because it was so. The end product is an interpretation of the engagement with the self. Others will decide on their own whether or not it's successful for them.

Bleier: De gustibus non disputandem est - "Of taste there is no disputing."