This Kansas City artist's giant paintings may 'make you a little uncomfortable.' That's the point...

Artist Fernando Achucarro paints late into the night in his home studio on Independence Avenue. The dark and moody images he conjures often rely on the glow of streetlights, candles and dimly-lit lamps. Many were inspired by the loss and trauma of life.
Fernando Achucarro’s new solo show at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center is called “Little Things,” but his paintings are as large as the themes he attempts to address.

“I want to make paintings that make you a little uncomfortable,” Achucarro says. “I don't like it when people come through a show and there's no reaction. I want it to have a punch.”

The heart of the show is a series of five large panels, 5 feet wide and 6 feet tall.

"These paintings are about emotions — not one feeling in particular, but feelings that everybody has," Achucarro says. "I have moments of happiness, (and) sometimes I feel really tired. So I am trying to paint those feelings and this is really hard because all these feelings are really abstract."

Achucarro’s images are surreal — in “The Meeting” a hooded figure rises over a calm sea while a man hangs suspended in the background on a beam of light — but the painter insists he is not a surrealist. Instead, he is an expressionist.