Excerpt:
...With his bold portraits of Hollywood and pop-music stars, bright landscapes and psychedelic abstractions, made with a unique, cardboard-inlay technique that is unmatched in the work of other contemporary, self-taught artists, the Mexican-American outsider Jesús Manuel Montes Arras has developed a growing collectorship in the United States for his ‘paintings’ and three-dimensional, sculptural constructions. The attention to Montes’ meticulous craftsmanship and unusual creations has come relatively quickly, too, considering that the Colorado-based artist only began making his artworks about a decade ago.

Montes, one of five sets of twins born to poor, farming parents in a rural village in the northern Mexican border state of Chihuahua, received only limited schooling and little exposure to art as a child. ‘I do remember watching my grandmother make traditional paper flowers out of tissue paper and crepe paper,’ Montes says during an interview at his home in Cañon City, a dusty, country outpost about two hours by car southwest of Denver. There, he has set up part of his studio on a simple patio that allows him to work outdoors, shielded from the strong desert sun that can easily wash the colour out of the landscape when it hovers overhead at high noon.