Growing up as a kid with artistic inclinations, Reinaldo Gil Zambrano saw the world as his canvas — more specifically, he saw a canvas in the walls of his family home.
“I was drawing around the house, on all the different walls, and my parents didn’t like that,” he recalls of his childhood in Caracas, Venezuela. Seeking clean walls without squelching their son’s budding creativity, his parents had an idea.
“They assigned me a mural wall next to my bed, in the bedroom that I used to share with my brother.” Gil Zambrano says. “They told me, ‘OK, you can paint this one, and you can repaint it. You take care of it.’ So technically, I started painting murals when I was, like, 10 years old.”
It’s the perfect origin story for someone who as an adult has painted murals on buildings, streets and restaurant walls across his adopted home city of Spokane. Someone who in 2020 created a civic mural proposal in hopes that Spokane business owners would, like his parents did long before, hand over an empty wall for beautification.
But in fact it took Gil Zambrano a few decades to return to his early interest in murals. And in the meantime he fell hard for another visual art form rooted in connection and camaraderie: woodblock prints.
For more than a decade, he’s been honing his skills as a printer — making meticulous carvings for large-scale works, experimenting with reduction and relief techniques and adding multiple colors. In the process, printmaking has helped Gil Zambrano build community in a home far from his origins.
Printmaking is also the medium he finds best suited for sharing his stories of home, which include architectural, societal and personal interpretations (sometimes all at once).
“In Venezuela, everyone tells lots of stories,” says Gil Zambrano. “It’s how we make something common into something extraordinary.” Acknowledging the long tradition of magical realism in Latin American literature, he says he too is “trying to bring a sense of magic to the mundane … to bring the unexpected into my work.”
Born in 1990, Gil Zambrano grew up surrounded by extended family and the warmth of togetherness. He fondly remembers spending time at his cousins’ house in the Venezuelan Andes. While the home was “maybe a little bit more fragile, more humble,” he says, it was nonetheless “full of life, full of music, full of food being shared by the family.”
He was drawn to visual storytelling early on, with influences including comics, graphic novels and anime — stories told in ways that transcend written language. He was especially enamored with children’s books by Venezuelan author Rosana Faría, whose illustrations helped him realize how drawings can “open the imagination.”
Gil Zambrano was constantly drawing in his youth, trying to copy favorite cartoons like Pokémon and Dragon Ball Z. And when (at his parents’ encouragement) he headed to a high school that was science-focused, he sought artistic outlets such as painting sets for the school theatrical productions.
At 16 he had an experience that changed his life forever: He received a scholarship to the United World School in Costa Rica. As he says, “There were 75 students from 72 countries,” and the cacophony of languages helped solidify his burgeoning belief in the power of visual arts to carry stories beyond words. He was there for two years, during which he began studying art and earned an International Baccalaureate.
That school led to another scholarship — one that took him from Costa Rica all the way to the Inland Northwest. He landed at the College of Idaho, in Caldwell, west of Boise, where he took arts classes while pursuing a BFA but hadn’t yet found his artistic passion. That didn’t happen until he went to graduate school for an MFA at the University of Idaho in Moscow.
“I was doing these big charcoal drawings, always trying to get this graphic quality with charcoal and ink,” he recalls of his graduate studies. “But then my friend Tim Han showed me Korean woodblocks, and he gave me this tool, my first tool, and a piece of block … I started carving, and I haven't stopped since then. It’s been almost 11 years.”
Gil Zambrano’s signature woodblock style is instantly recognizable: bold black lines and striking figures, intricate cross-hatching for shading and depth, surreal elements and little surprises (think kites, hot air balloons and paper airplanes).
Each piece carves a different story, but certain iconography appears again and again: wind-blown clouds, orchids, alpacas, telephone poles with bowed wires, and gondolas — the last of which, coincidentally, operate in both Caracas and Spokane.
Most ubiquitous in Gil Zambrano’s work is imagery of home. It might be barrio buildings tumbled together in a bowl of traditional Pisca Andina soup. Or a modest structure with a barrel-tile roof, hung like an ornament from a branch growing out of a woman’s face. Or a stately Northwest house from which a person is bursting through the exterior wall, flying upward like a superhero. Each conveys a memory, a feeling or aspiration.
Sometimes homes take the place of heads on human bodies, weighing them down with the pressures of ownership. Faces open to reveal entire neighborhood blocks within, and animals with sly smiles carry whole homes on their backs — both suggesting the ways we bring our personal understanding of home with us as we move to each new place.
“I have been moving so much since I was 16 years old, I feel the idea of home is something that I have been trying to define for myself,” Gil Zambrano says. “Sometimes it’s detached from the infrastructure of the house, because what matters is the love and the care and community that a family brings into that space.”
He notes that while he admires aesthetic architecture, seeing the barrios in Caracas made him appreciate the improvised structures. “They were built by the community organically — to build space for a family to grow,” he says. “Then inside, everybody will have these really big meals or parties.”
Gil Zambrano thought about this a lot when he moved from Idaho to Spokane with his wife (who is originally from Spokane). They got an apartment in Browne’s Addition, Spokane’s first official neighborhood, populated with large mansions that have since been segmented into smaller units. He regularly walked the neighborhood, squaring it up with his old visions of the American dream.
“Sometimes the building can be really beautiful,” he says, “but it doesn't mean that there is this warm feeling inside.”
Now an assistant professor of printmaking at Gonzaga University with his own family to nurture, Gil Zambrano pours his thoughts about home into painstakingly carved artworks. He’s made a piece about the warm home his mother and grandmother created; one about the anxiety of home ownership; another imagining the day his young son grows up and leaves home.
In some of the prints he uses isometric projection — an architectural drawing technique used to show three sides of an object at once. Without the vanishing points our eyes are accustomed to, these works have a topsy-turvy feeling, like drawings by M.C. Escher. In this way, Gil Zambrano can depict worlds that are both familiar and surreal.
Gil Zambrano’s enchantment with the printmaking process prompted him to co-found a print center in 2019. The Spokane Print & Publishing Center is a nonprofit full of presses for relief printing, screenprinting, etching and letterpress. It’s a vibrant space further enlivened by the murals Gil Zambrano has painted inside. One of them — a camelid whose hump contains clouds, mushrooms and an active volcano — marked his return to drawing on walls for the first time since childhood.
It’s a dream setting for fellow printmakers to join in making art and teaching others to do the same. “That was one of the major parts of me falling in love with this medium,” Gil Zambrano says. “The gathering of the people.”
A foundational feature of printing is the ability to make multiple copies of a message, and rally people around a common goal. “That’s why this process is associated with revolutions,” Gil Zambrano says. “In history, it has been a way to provide a voice to the voiceless.”
Gil Zambrano continues to find ways to gather people around a creative home. He established the Spokane Print Festival (which includes a community streamroller-press event). And he’s a co-host of the podcast Hello, Print Friend, founded and directed by print maven Miranda K. Metcalf.
For his episodes, Gil Zambrano interviews Spanish-speaking printmakers, learning about the contemporary print scene in Costa Rica, Oaxaca, Uruguay, Bogotá and elsewhere, in the process knitting the global print community closer together.
Hello, Print Friend has led Gil Zambrano to a print residency in Thailand, and to yet another way of gathering community: directing documentaries. In addition to short video visits to various print studios, he’s made two recent films. Grabando Oaxaca, about printmaking in Oaxaca, and Impressions of Resistance: Printmaking in Puerto Rico. Both are immersive journeys into international print culture.
A couple years ago, he was able to interview his children’s-book illustrator idol, Rosana Faría, for the podcast — a conversation even an imaginative child poring over pictures in a book would never dream of having some 30 years later. It was her drawings that took root in Gil Zambrano’s young mind and bloomed into his guiding truth about visual storytelling: “You can create a little world,” he says. “And then people can find themselves in it too.”
Brangien Davis
Catch up with all the artists featured in Seasons 1 and 2 of Art by Northwest.
