sometimes i wonder where being an artist came from to me and every time i reach the same conclusion: it was always there, wired into me and that my mother's uterus contains my first marks. but someone always touches you as a child and maybe their influence gives you the final little push you need to decide to dedicate your life to being an artist. in my case, there are three men i grew up with who definitely influenced my child artist and nurtured my creativity: my brother miguel, my father and tato, my grandfather
my brother miguel (who for a time i thought was my other father but that is a story for another post) is a musician and being much older than me, i would spend hours as a child listening to the music he listened to which was not the music you would find in the radio. i would also be part of his band rehearsals and of his creative process as he made a fusion of rock and andean music. i grew up thinking being an artist is normal and i admired miguel so much and saw him as a father figure so i thought i wanted to be an artist too but not with music, my thing was mark making.
my dad was a closet poet; he was an artist that became an engineer because he was supposed to be someone normal and make a living. but his spirit was somewhere else. he would draw all the time and even though he opposed to me becoming an artist at first (it was out of over protection and a fear that i would not make a living off it), he became my biggest supporter until he died. when i was tiny, about 5 years old, dad would take me to the local open air market to look at everything the market sold. this is were i acquired a fascination for colors from nature, textures, shapes, tones... what we did is similar to what i do with my students with artworks in museums, learn to look and look intently and be able to wonder and explore.
my grandfather tato was, among other things like a writer/researcher, a doctor. i spent long hours with him and my grandma as my parents were constantly going through turmoil. with tato, i would look at the illustrations made by Dore in Don Quixote, the ones in his old Larousse dictionary and also at medicine books and magazines. he was also my provider of paper, he brought home tons of cadmium yellow and lettuce green paper that came with x-ray film (he was a radiologist) that me and my siblings would draw on, make little books with, write on. i knew that paper was special, it was not like the one i used in pre-school, maybe this is where i started developing a love for paper.
all of this combined gave me a different perspective on art than i would not have had with a conventional upbringing and if you add to that the fact that my brothers taught me to read with Mad magazine and peanuts comics, it's easy to then understand my work more.
i'm grateful for this childhood which was difficult and sad, with long days, weeks and months being sick, but sickness also gave me time to be still and read, think, reflect, wonder, figure out, look. it all worked out in the end.
