Late Beginning

 

        Born in Cuba in 1974 I was a child obsessed with tinkering. Galvanized by my father I would hack, bend and nail anything that I could put my hands on. Thanks to my father I made close acquaintance with tools and craft very prematurely in my life.  

 

        My father was a man caught between fatherhood and senility, in a final stage where a deep love for inventions, a frightening digital dexterity and minotaural carnal passions were cooling down in a mold, plasticized in the form of my figure hero; the type with the creative cape. I still can picture my father celebrating every artifact I came up with, I still remember him collecting my childish drawings, taking it to his job and to proudly show them to his colleagues. My father was the drum that taught my heart how to march. I still can pick the tempo reverberating in my soul long after the drum ceased to exist.

 

       Already a teenager and after notably academic success in high school I drifted toward a more pragmatic and horizon leveled mechanical engineer career. Nonetheless, despite not becoming a painter, mechanical designs kept me in the realm of objects and shapes, in the close observation and acute discernment, in the scouting for an ever higher order of geometry and patterns, as Michelangelo put it, mechanical arts and visual arts share drawings as their common foundation, drawings lines are the borrows were both arts’ seeds are planted.

 

      All along my journey as mechanical engineer and in spite of being in highly creative environments I would remember painting with the same guilt one feels while looking at an unfinished book. Every attempt to exorcise this feeling out of my body failed, it was as permanent in my mind as being hot iron branded on the flank, I always belonged to the art ranch.

 

      This desire reached its highest pressure point when I was in my thirties and already living in United States. It took painting only and afternoon and a shoddy six dollars’ oil color set to obliterated the dam that was containing it. Painting came down like a torrent of ravishing murky water slashing every non-artistic interest settled at the banks of my life where they had not right to be, from that moment on, all I wanted to do was painting. Armed with books and online courses I began teaching myself on how to paint; enlisted under the strict command of my guts.The oil color set was a gift from my wife in her genuine attempt, financially cautious mind you, to fill my mental gap. This has probably been one of the most fruitful gift I have ever received.

 

 

 

Style & Technique

 

     I'm naturally partial to representational art. My portraits and still-lives are utterly realistic. Independent of my way of working I admire all styles, idioms, movements, genres and schools of painting. I found all styles equally impactful and consequential. The dissimilarity among them only depicts how art creation and appreciation is positively correlated to individual’s personalities and does not make any style more salient than others. Therefore, my inclination to a more naturalistic way of painting is driven by my internal need for platform, meaning and conscientiousness; which are palpable characteristics of my personality. 

 

     I work exclusively in oils, and I use linen or cotton canvas and hardboard as support. I am fond of mediums that increase the drying time of the paint, allowing me to work wet on wet for longer periods of time.  I found this approach very favorable to achieve the level of detail and the visual effect I am after. I systematically evaluate my experiences, synthesizing and simplifying my own method of painting.

 

       I work from life as well as from photographs. I undoubtedly favor the former as the majority of painters do, nonetheless I do not reject the practical advantages a photograph offers. I frantically strive for a realistic painting that is divorced from the panoramic and focal stiffness of the photo. I toil to offer a lifelike visual experience and not a photorealistic impression of life.

 

      My lifelong technical goal as a painter is to create a work that will shatter the viewer notion that he is in front of a two dimensional object. I want to be able to tear down the plane of the painting, giving the depicted subjects the rights of a fictional topography. I want to corrupt people depth perception.

 

 

 

Composition & Vision

 

      All my compositions are affected by violent contrasts of light and shadow. I employ this lighting technique to maximize the volumetric appearance of the objects as well as to augment mood and drama.

 

     The austerity of my compositions, the dramatic focal illumination and the bleakness of my backgrounds are the results of my fondness for the work of tenebrist Spanish painters as El Greco, Jusepe de Ribera, Diego Velasquez and Francisco Goya, their peninsular black seriousness has engulfed my paintings.

 

      Another chiaroscuro artist who possesses my utmost veneration is Rembrandt van Rijn. He had the unparalleled capacity to depict his subjects more accessible and vulnerable, unmasked; the one who controlled the largest inventory of emotional expressions, the physiognomy genius, the depicter of lax breast and pot bellies, the one who true to life represented the features of the ugly and the grotesque, the champion of individuality. I want this to be my pictorial voice and vision. I want one day to paint people without their mental war masks, without their logical helmets, with their rhetorical spears and scholar shields out of reach, to portrait the axiom that is to be human. I want to immersed myself in the in and outs of people faces, sculpt their peaks and valleys and the resonating turns in between, that maybe if I could ever reproduce with my own hands how heavenly original and beautiful is our flesh geometry in this sub facial level, we could always see beauty disregarding aesthetics prejudices of sex, race or age.

 

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  Education:

• 1998-Mechanical Engineer Degree-UCLV 

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  Awards:

•        Second Place in the Artist's Magazine 33rd Annual Art Competition in the portrait/figure category with My Pete (oil on canvas 36 X 48)

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•        Finalist in the Artist's Magazine  34th Annual Art Competition in the portrait/figure category with Peter with Straw Hat (oil on canvas 24 X 20)