I started painting
at the age of 13, was drawing earlier under the
influence of books on Durer and Rembrandt which
my father possessed. I spent about seven years
attending the free academy of my master, Miguel
Venegas Cifuentes, whose outlook, as an architect
and Director of the Fine Arts Academy of the Catholic
University in Santiago, Chile, was strongly classic
and academic; but his own versatility was prodigious.
I
had my first one-man show in 1958, in Santiago, at
a time when I was studying for a career in law. Then,
as a practicing attorney I had scarce time for art;
during these ten years I painted no more than ten pictures
per year, in a rapid impressionist-expressionist technique
("Streets", "Market", "Mountains").
I began to look for a technique, system, method to
fit the short time at my disposal. At the same time
I was teaching a few hours of Art to the last grades
in the Jesuit High School in Chillan, Chile; as teaching
leads to learning, I began exploring different ages
and schools of painting to stimulate the students with
a sense of freedom.
In the course of my first
trip to the US in 1964, I was strongly impressed by
the Van Gogh retrospective at the Guggenheim and some
Gauguin paintings at the Phillips. I started experimenting
in "musical" and "linear" styles,
and began painting "series" ("Rocks,
Cobquecura", "The Lake", "Trees").
In 1968 I exhibited and sold my first paintings in "vertical" style,
and painted my first totally abstract compositions,
a series titled "Little Red Riding Hood".
In 1971 I left Chile
and the profession of Law to become a painter in Australia.
During my Australian years, my main care was to learn
to "finish" the large paintings in acrylics,
mainly landscapes with birds, demanding local detail
and the strong light of Australia ("River", "City", "Egret" series).
However, at the time I began to use the material leftovers
in strongly expressionist and abstract compositions
with thick texture and collage, in some of which the
addition of the special source of light was necessary
("Cockfight"). The guiding idea was to produce
an object with some of the third-dimensional character
of a square sculpture or a huge jewel. After a visit
to the Grand Canyon in 1978, I initiated a series of
semiabstract seascapes and landscapes in which the
predominant preoccupation was light through values
of a given color in a simple composition of united
subject, based on use of rough surfaces with strong
impasto contrasting with plain areas. ("Sealight", "Canyon", "Rock" series).
At the time I was under contract to produce numbers
of Australian landscapes, still-lifes and interiors
for different galleries and chains all over the country;
I used to work simultaneously on ten or more pictures,
with different subjects and styles and even media,
as is said Picasso did, and I still do. I learned that
the opposition and similarities in several paintings,
coexisting, sometimes fertilize each other and stimulate
creativity.
On my arrival in the
US in 1980, I decided to maintain and deepen the variations
and explorations started and affirmed in the last years
of freedom in Australia. I have been painting mainly
in three currents: realist/impressionist/postimpressionist,
surrealist and abstract/expressionist, which I consider
the most interesting and fertile of our time (or the
most apt to express my interests and creative urge).
I don't see a real contradiction between them, or any
necessity of consistency to fill those mere labels.
It would be a loss of time trying to find a unique
synthesis. That meaning would appear by itself, or
never appear. Only the future will say if we did it
in a positive sense and in the right place.
By now, I have been painting
for more than sixty years. I have tried almost every
technique, every subject. I have sold thousands of
paintings. Following the path of my master Miguel,
I have been teaching for many years. Traveling, I have
painted in many streets and byways, in almost every
corner of the world. I exhibited my work every year,
and continue to do so in galleries of New England;
the Internet I hope will let me show my work to new
eyes, in a sort of wider perspective or ideal retrospective.
Like Miguel, my master, I believe the pleasure of painting
is in the painting, not in the selling. I quote from
his last (untranslatable) letter: "El pén
dulo ha vuelto. Del borron ininteligible a la tontera
frivola...De lo informe a lo geométrico - de
lo abstracto a lo super-realista... y el mundo sigue.
Y tú y yo, como monjes del medioevo, callados,
lejanos, solitarios, mirando, observando y guardando
celosos el patrimonio de lo eterno" (1975)
A synthesis of the art
of our day and time, that is perhaps what we wanted
to be, or to do with so many essays, attempts, experiments
and experience of what looks like chaos, indecipherable. "Only
time -the master concluded- discovers the truth. This
French saying gives me a perspective of what I am and
want to pursue in my journey through time". We
do not paint to explain in writing, but to see the
work done.
