Conversations with Gino Castellanos

Today we’d like to introduce you to Gino Castellanos.

Hi Gino, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My name is Gino Castellanos. I was born in Havana, Cuba in 1995, a year after Castro opened the island and allowed people to cross the ocean on a raft. My father was one of these people (which eventually would allow me to come to the US), so I was raised by a single mother. She got pregnant the night before my father decided to risk it all and crossed to the US. The first 16 years of my life were pretty uneventful. Now that I’ve lived in the US for 10 years, I realize how incredibly dull and pathetic those years on the island were. I had no ambitions, no goals, and no purpose. Although I had fond memories of a simple childhood, after turning 9 or 10 I started to develop contempt for everything around me. The days flowed by, all feeling the same. I remember a distinct disgust for everything around me. I lived in a very poor area, and everything was always filthy and the people were mostly miserable and in a foul mood all the time. I was never any good at anything and had no particular talents. I liked anime and loved the cool illustrations of superheroes but never tried my hand at anything related to fine art. I didn’t even know something called graphic design existed. There was no fire in me to become anything. Luckily, the opportunity to come to America presented itself in 2011, and coming here would represent the biggest shift in perspective I’ve ever had. To this day, I still see the day I got here as the day I was reborn.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I can’t say my life has been exceptionally hard outside of my own head. If anything I consider myself the luckiest man alive just because I am able to breathe American air every morning and not the stagnant Cuban air . I think the hardest battles I’ve had to face so far have mostly been against myself. Because I was so aimless, it took a lot of mental strength to shift into who I am becoming today. The change has been so drastic that it feels like dying and being reborn, and as you may imagine, trying to change like that do most people in. I honestly have a hard time dealing with the fact that I am such a different individual than who I was only a few years ago. I had some social problems when I tried to integrate into the American culture. I found it repelled me pretty harshly, but if anything, that made me focus more strongly on the task at hand and created fewer distractions in my path. This lack of integration made me an introvert, and I have always had a hard time with that. It has crippled me pretty badly before, but somehow I always stayed afloat. I never had issues with the system or my community because I’ve tried to stay away from depending on others as much as possible. Most of my success and failures come from my own self. Every time I do something right or miss the mark, I have only myself to blame. This is a good thing because in both scenarios, there is growth of character.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am both a graphic designer and a printmaker. As a designer, I can do most things that the designer does, but I specialize in brand management. I feel the most comfortable when we are creating a brand for a new business from scratch. When I sit down with a client and we talk about what the business means to them and how we can create a logo that perfectly represents it and still looks good wherever it may appear. From there, I love designing everything else the business may need, from the stationery to a site, to a car wrap, etc. I also do a lot of digital illustrations.

Printmaking is the traditional art of creating multiples from the same piece of art. There are many techniques you can use to achieve this, all of them very complex. The one I’m mostly known for is woodcut, or the art of carving a block of wood and printing work from that. I’ve become so proficient in printmaking that it has effectively obscured my design work as of late. Most of my work comes from themes that I try to make universal rather than personal. I think we have more to learn from humanity in general than from focusing on one particular individual, although in order to do that, it’s important to know that each individual is special in how different we are from one another. I have different series I’m working on at the moment. One tackles the creation of emotions and the balance of responsibility to create order and chaos and another explores universal folklore.

What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
You need to learn to work on yourself. You don’t have to necessarily love yourself (you know your own faults better than anyone), but you do need to take care of yourself and make sure you want the absolute best in the future. Realize that you only have you before you can inherit the world. You are a civilized, extremely complex work of an evolutionary miracle, that lives in a society full of others just like you, and that demands that you play by the rules. Learn how to best morph these rules and yourself to get the best out of your career and your life. Don’t expect anyone to do the work for you. You have to go out there and get it done.

Feelings like pain, sadness, or even happiness are temporary. What’s long-lasting is the responsibility of taking care of yourself and those you love, and in order to that, it’s required that we learn to sacrifice our present for our future.