Born 1980. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
“The hyper-realistic nature of Jeff Ramirez’s work captures the honest and sometimes awkward moments of his subjects, unwittingly revealing their vulnerability. These moments of heightened emotions, paired with the compulsion to divert the onlooker’s gaze, make us all the more curious and pulls us in.”
I live and work in Los Angeles, but I grew up just up the coast in Ventura County. We lived near a port, a naval base and a lot of agriculture, so there was a real mosaic of culture. Between that and my own heritage, I was always moving between different groups and trying to assimilate, questioning identity and relationships and such.
My mother painted when I was young and my father did woodworking as a hobby and so I was exposed to that creative impulse even through it was never really encouraged in my youth. I went to the University of California at Santa Cruz to study computer programming and I enjoyed that, but I found myself more concerned with the look and feel of my projects than with their core functionality. Spending all of those late nights programming and compiling got to be a drag and I started looking for something with a bit more community to it. Once I started experimenting with art, everything just clicked.
