What started off as a tiny white dot on a black background has turned into colorful artwork that catches the eye.

Michael DeLuca, an artist in Philadelphia who uses human figures and bright backgrounds in his work, showed his artistic trajectory in an artist talk at the VAC on Oct. 24.

In the “Stratification” exhibit, the works show cutout faces and features, with the images coming from art history textbooks and historic works. 

DeLuca talked about how he started to become interested in what humans feel on a non-surface level. 

“Once I started doing this, I noticed that what I was interested in was underlying emotions,” he said. “What we see on the surface is not always what’s happening underneath.”

On his usage of historical works in his art, he said, “The work from that show came from vandalizing a lot of work that I loved.”

“I had such a strong connection with those drawings,” he continued, “but I just said, ‘I got to do this’. In my mind, I wasn’t destroying them – but I just had to do it.”

Of his earlier work, DeLuca spoke about how he drew different shapes in a diminished way. 

“I was really interested in the accidents of these edges here,” he said. “Nothing is too clean, too symmetrical, too straight – I was really interested in the offness of some of these here.”

DeLuca also touched upon his processes of reconceptualizing past works. 

“One day, I just started thinking about introducing color, creeping it in a tiny bit, so I started going back into older drawings,” he said. “That became a really big part of my process: recycling and revisiting work. Some of these that I show, I might have three different versions of it where they just keep building and building.”

He also spoke about his interest in artificial intelligent images being used in his art. 

“What I’m interested in, as of yesterday, is AI-generated images, AI people,” he said. “That’s a whole other world that I’ve started exploring: AI and the difference between human and robotic existence. That’s why I’m kind of interested in those.”

DeLuca has created a lot of work in a short amount of time, with some work that he showed being finished two days prior.

When asked about how he stays so disciplined in his work, he said “I think it’s really healthy to keep a practice going. I try to be every day.”

He continued by saying, “I have two little kids too, so that’s helped me be able to be much more efficient.”

He ended the talk by saying, “That’s my purpose in life: it’s to help connect with people through art.”

Jordan Ooten can be contacted at [email protected].