- Like a lot of artists, Juan Jose Hoyos Quiles spent years working a day job before he pursued art full-time.

The former New Yorker now lives in Clearwater where he devotes his days to painting eye-catching abstract works.

(lively music) - My name is Juan Jose Hoyos Quiles and I'm an abstract, hard edge geometric painter.

That term, I think, started in the early 1930s by an artist called Theo van Doesburg who coined a term called Concrete Art, and what that means is it's non-objective and it usually involves flat colors, some kind of geometry, and it's totally abstract and refers to nothing but really itself.

Right now, I'm working on a painting involving triangles of many different colors.

I've tried making figural paintings or more fluid paintings, expressionist paintings but they just don't work out for me.

I am kind of a precise artist and I like geometry.

I'm attracted to it.

What I want people to get when how they see my work is good composition.

The colors might evoke things that the person has lived with, anything from the color of the kitchen when they were a kid or the color of a landscape or a tree or flower.

- Well, I have three pieces in the house.

The first one actually was a gift for some things that I had done and I picked it because the essence of it was pretty simple with a white background and then the geometric figures were so intriguing that I just wanted to hang it up and look at it and see what talked to me or how it made me feel.

And it actually got me through a rather rough period in my life.

I was recovering from surgery and COVID at the same time and that painting hung over the bed where I was recovering and it gave me a lot of time to focus and meditate.

(upbeat music) - I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.

I've always drawn since a child and from grades one through six, I was introduced to a lot of the arts, theater and music.

I went to the School of Visual Arts in 1979 through the early '80s.

Keith Haring was attending at the same time and his career skyrocketed from there.

Keith Haring was what you might call a later day pop artist.

At that time, there were a lot of storefront galleries that opened up in the Lower East Side, which was a part of Manhattan, which was very gritty, drug driven and there were a lot of abandoned buildings.

There was a lot of people, a lot of artists actually squatting in these areas.

I had a loft where I did my work with my fellow artists.

We split the rent and that's how my art career started.

I went to School of Visual Arts for three years.

Throughout that time, I was working, I was putting myself through the school, and money got tight.

I did not have enough money to finish and get my degree and New York being a very expensive city, I had to find a way to support myself, so I worked for a good 30 years in management.

My transition to Clearwater, Florida started in 2014.

My husband and I decided that we want to go somewhere warmer.

(tranquil music) (upbeat music) I start with a blank canvas.

And we gesso the surface which already come with called a gesso, which is a light plaster because I find that the extra layer of gesso helps in that adherence of the day.

Sometimes I outline a composition directly on the canvas.

Sometimes I don't.

Sometimes I start with a circle or a square somewhere and just build off from there.

(upbeat music) As far as the colors are concerned, that's kind of intuition also.

I use acrylic paint.

What I usually do is add a little gesso, a little matte medium and a little water when I'm mixing the paint.

And that gives it a completely matte finish.

It doesn't have a shine to it.

The reason why the lines come out so perfect, that's where the term hard edge comes from, is that the tape that I use is very sticky, number one.

When I apply the tape, I use a spatula to actually press this tape into the surface of the painting so that I make sure it adheres and none goes underneath the tape.

(upbeat music) What I would say to a person who is stuck in a job, who has to support themselves for any reason and has loved the art previously as a child or a teenager or early adult, and then you have to find yourself that you have to work is to never give up.

Once you're an artist, you're always an artist.

You might not be making physical work, but you eventually, if really wanna do it will get back to it just like I did.

(lively music) - [Narrator] To see more, visit JuanJoseHoyosQuiles.com.