Mitch Villa is a young artist — just 28 years old — who has a precocious talent. It’s too soon to know what tales his talent will tell, but you can catch his vivid urban landscapes at Habit Coffee.
Villa is shy but charming, with long, blond hair and bright blue eyes. Then one notices the tattoos creeping up beyond his shirt collar and all over his hands. There is more to Villa than meets the eye. This depth is also evident in his painting.
For his exhibit at Habit — his first, really — he has brought in a half-dozen large canvases of some of Victoria’s signature settings: Chinatown, the “design district” of Lower Johnson Street, float homes at Fisherman’s Wharf. Yet back at his Chinatown studio, I saw work in progress in a more “aggressive” style: a great arm-swinging painting of a car crash, with mangled and sexy bodies flung about.
Villa has participated in the Moss Street Paint-In three times so far, and says he has heard “a few old ladies” say “that young man has a lot of anger in him.” He laughed.
“I’m very mild-mannered, generally. I don’t get angry at anything, but when I’m painting, I like to put the aggression in it. It feels like there is a lot of movement. It’s a powerful and positive aggression, not frightening. It energizes me to look at it and be around it.”
Born in Thunder Bay, Villa moved to Victoria when he was three. While growing up in Colwood, instead of soccer and baseball, he took art classes. Among his teachers were Dar Churcher and Tess Morgan. After high school, he studied digital design at the Vancouver Film School, where his talent was recognized and he was encouraged to get on with his painting.
But in Vancouver, he said, “I was overstimulated and overworked.” So he took off travelling about five years ago, and eventually returned to Victoria.
“It’s quieter here. For painting, you’ve gotta sit down and shut the door,” he told me. “It takes time to set up, to clean up, and it’s hard if you’re being distracted by friends or life or whatever.”
Villa has already carved out his own style, which he suggested is a form of “abstracted realism.” The shattered and spattered effects have made some people assume he’s coming from a graffiti background, but he denies it. Comics have been more influential.
His ability to render figures and to mix and match planes of reality stands him in good stead. But his practice has plenty of room for gestural painting and completely arbitrary colour choices. And these colours can be hot.
A giant Chinatown at Night triptych opens the show, with a dragon dance and traffic chaos under the gate — at night, in the rain. He begins with a downloaded image, and he really knows how to chop it up and reassemble it. This digital collage is transferred to the canvas in what he calls a “nice clean rendering.” Then, as he paints, he breaks it apart again.
“I get to a level of finish,” he says, “then tear it apart, get it cleaned up and rework it. When I start out, I don’t have an exact picture of what it will turn out like.” Getting there is half the fun.
His painting of Habit Coffee is perfectly readable, but each big neon letter has a different treatment.
“I really love doing text,” Villa explained, “but it’s too simple if you can just read it perfectly. So I mess around with it a little bit.”
Then, once he’s got things working really well, he takes a big brush full of black paint and lets fly.
“Growing up looking at comic books, I got to like black outlines, bold ink work,” Villa noted.
He has a way of painting people with a few oblique daubs of colour and making them photographic in effect. But he keeps the people in their place: “They’re almost like a ghost of a person, just kind of floating along, not taking away from street scene which is the central focus.” Villa achieves this with a sort of stop-action stroboscopic effect that avoids the precision of rendering.
It’s hard to find a place to show your paintings in Victoria. It’s essentially impossible to get taken on by the commercial galleries, and even Villa’s show at Habit was booked a year ahead. So what is a young person of talent and ambition to do?
“I’m not somebody who really wants to self-promote,” Villa admits. “I find it embarrassing, even to do it on social media. But I’m trying to do that more, talk to people, meet people at shows. You never know what kind of doors are going to open.”
In fact, I met Villa at his table at a Christmas craft fair at Oak Bay’s Monterey Centre. He has participated in the Small Works show at the Art Gallery’s art rental area, and an immediate goal is to see his Victoria paintings hanging in the airport.
But Villa is happy at home in Chinatown. We said goodbye at the bottom of the narrow wooden stairway, which is painted bright red, that leads up to his studio. He smiled, and quipped: “So, what’s not to like about living in Chinatown?”
Life here is good, and it’s even better if you’re young and talented.
Mitch Villa, paintings at Habit Coffee (552 Pandora Ave., open daily) until Feb. 28.
