Juan Gomez, winner of Red Bull Doodle Art Canada, holds up his doodle

Art

Where art meets technology: meet your Red Bull Doodle Art Canada winner

Get to know what "Loving Life" means to Juan Gomez, Canada's Red Bull Doodle Art winner.

By Marc Shaw

3 min readPublished on 05/04/2023 · 2:04 PM UTC

When art and technology meet, artists find themselves with more paths to explore their creativity. Red Bull Doodle Art saw many Canadian artists put their pen to paper, or stylus to tablet, to take what’s on their mind and put it on the blockchain. This year’s Canadian winner, Quebec City’s Juan Gomez, saw the freedom of doodling taken from their notebook margins and turned into something more.

“I doodle to express myself. It helps me to clarify my thoughts,” explained Gomez, who finds themselves doodling at all times of the day (as long as there is a light source). “One moment I prefer is, maybe, before I go to bed because it’s when the day is less noisy. I try to do a recap in my head of ‘what was my day?’, it’s like a diary.”

Juan Gomez is the Canadian national winner for Red Bull Doodle Art. — Juan Gomez doodling in his diary
© Anne-Sophie Lavoie

Gomez happened upon Red Bull Doodle Art online, and immediately zeroes in on the submission criteria of a piece which reflects “loving life”. For them, loving life comes from being together with people and enjoying simple things, which is represented by their piece that shows people laughing together, hanging around a campfire with each other, and doing the things they love to do.

“There’s a little bonsai I put in the drawing, it represents that love” said Gomez. “A bonsai, you have to take care of it, just a little, every day so it can grow and be well. For me, a lovely life is being patient and taking care of things around us, including us.”

Gomez has been doodling since he can remember and says the pursuit helped him in elementary school when he needed to stay quiet in a class he found boring. From that young age, he got used to people regularly calling him an artist, but he wasn’t really sure if that would be the right path for him. While he currently teaches drawing and painting, while taking commissions on the side, Gomez had actually studied the sciences at Laval University.

I think I wanted to be like my uncle, who is a doctor. I thought, maybe I wanted to do a ‘real’ job but, with time, I realized that drawing and painting is my thing. Nothing makes me feel better than doing art.
Juan Gomez

While his favourite artists include names like Bouguereau and Da Vinci, he finds the most inspiration from seeing the doodles of others. In developing his art style over the years, Gomez decided to really home in on originality as much as possible. He wants to develop his own visual language. Currently, his favourite way to doodle is on acid free paper with archival quality, to avoid yellowing over time, in a small format so he can doodle at home over time. He describes his style as figurative, but not abstract, always seeing shapes and recognizing them in realistic proportions.

The way his style brought forth his vision for what loving life means struck a chord with the judges as well, and Gomez is heading to the Red Bull Doodle Art World Final in Amsterdam. It was a bit of a surprise to find out that he’ll be representing Canada on the world stage.

“My reaction [to winning] was ‘I can’t believe it’. I think I read it at least three times to be sure,” said Gomez who started checking out Amsterdam on Google Earth in anticipation of their trip. “I know that the Van Gogh Museum is in Amsterdam, I think not too far from Red Bull’s office, so I have to be able to [see] that.”