The Graphic
Figurative painting has always portrayed the individual, mostly focusing on the psychological aspects. But what if one wanted to paint the ideological part that moves humans as a whole? How does one depict the ideology hidden behind the large masses of human beings?
Graphic derives from the Greek graphikós, meaning "drawn" or "written." A graphic representation can be a drawing or picture that shows information. The graphic also relates to the use of graphs to display data. When one needs to depict immense scenes beyond the reach of our vision, such as our solar system or the universe, a way to do it is through graphic means. Through graphs, it is possible to display huge amounts of information that wouldn’t be able to be shown otherwise. Graphic descriptions can produce very clear, detailed, and powerful mental images.
Arrival to Mexico
When I arrived in Mexico, the artist Abel Galvan was waiting for me at the airport accompanied by his good old friend, whom I don’t remember his name, only that he had a big shaggy beard and a big old, bumped-up car in which we drove to Abel’s studio, downtown. After walking up a flight of stairs and Abel opening the door, I was surprised. There, with expressions of expectation, were all Guadalajara's artists, poets, musicians, and radio people, giving me a most hearty welcome. One by one, they introduced themselves, some reciting their poems with such emotion that they cried, others with dance steps, others pulling coins out of their pockets to show me what was worth what, and last but not least, the presenter of the city’s major cultural radio station, who came out of the kitchen wearing a chefs apron and handing me a large Tequila. I gladly accepted the drink, and when I tried to make a speech, I almost couldn't because of the overwhelming emotion. I was not used to such expressive and dramatic feelings; I had never experienced this in the places where I had lived. That night, before falling asleep, I decided I would live in Mexico.
Abel gave me a tour of the city, and then I looked for a place to rent. After a week or so, I found a place that seemed ideal for painting and living. Overall, I was struck by how Mexican architects treated the interior versus the exterior when designing homes. For example, when being outside in the street, as in any urban environment, I was surrounded by concrete, smog, telephone poles, electric cables, and the noises of buses, trucks, and so forth. Still, the minute I walked into a house, it was like walking out into the countryside. Inside there were trees, flowers, chickens, and waterfalls. Every home I visited in Guadalajara was like a little natural paradise.
2002
I embarked on a quest to find new ways to incorporate text into my paintings. I started with a series of studies using stencils.
2003
The bombing of Iraq began. Again! While I experimented with the stencils, I painted a series of oils about the sufferings of war.
2004
After watching the news coverage of the bombing of Iraq and seeing how much power the media had in our perception of reality, I immersed myself in a series of paintings of people reading newspapers. The newspaper texts were painted by hand with a #0 brush. But if one looks at them closely, they are not actual words that can be read. They are painted in a way to suggest that they are real words. They are painted in an impressionistic style.
2005
I met Pablo Guerrero of Pablo Guerrero Gallery, the son of Jesus Guerrero Santos, a well-known and established ceramist. Many of his pieces had been commissioned by the Vatican, including pieces made especially for Pope John Paul II during his visit to Mexico for the canonization of St. Juan Diego. Pablo offered to represent my work in Mexico. He organized an exhibition of my drawings. The morning before the opening, I received a call from an art dealer and picture framer. She told me that Pablo had handed her my drawings to be framed for the exhibition and that a client had just entered the shop and bought a couple of them ahead of the show. The name of the art dealer was Patricia. She offered to handle my art in Mexico, assuring me she could easily sell my work. I told her that I was already committed to Pablo Guerrero Gallery. Some years later, Patricia would become one of my most fervent and supportive art dealers.
2005
Up until now, the texts of the newspapers in my paintings were not meant to be read. As I mentioned earlier, the texts were painted in such a way as to give the impression of being real. Now I wanted the texts to be readable. Being it almost impossible to paint such long, repetitive text using a brush, I found another way to do this, through silkscreen! Silkscreen printing is a stenciling method that involves forcing ink through a pattern cut into silk or other similar cloth, stretched across a frame, called a screen.
The Technique that I Used
I first created my text in photoshop. I took the text and printed it out onto a transparent acetate film that would be used to create the stencil. I coated the screen with a layer of light-reactive emulsion, which would harden when developed under bright light. I would then lay the acetate sheet featuring the text onto the emulsion-coated screen and expose the whole thing to bright light; I did this outdoors, under the sunlight. After the screen had been exposed for a set time, the areas of the screen not covered by the text would turn hard. Any unhardened emulsion, I then rinsed away. This left an imprint of the text on the net. I then placed the screen on top of the canvas, and I pulled the paint along the full length of the screen using a squeegee. This pressed the color through the open areas of the stencil, imprinting the text on the canvas underneath. I would then wash the canvas to remove any residue. The canvas was now ready to be painted on.
2006
I was invited to show my work at the Raúl Anguiano Museum in Guadalajara. I painted a large painting titled Table Scenes. It was a triptych. After the exhibition, someone was interested in buying it but only wanted the right-hand side of the painting. Often, when I painted triptychs and they left the studio, people would disregard the order in which the artworks were supposed to hang. Aside from defacing the work, it entirely changed the piece's meaning.
2006
One often feels alone when one is critical of society and talks about injustices. The majority prefers to look the other way and pretend everything is fine. With this in mind, I painted a series of paintings titled “Soliloquy.”
2007
A retrospective of my last four years of work was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Colima, Mexico.
2008
There was a high demand for my paintings; I had about two individual exhibitions a year. It took me around four months to complete a body of work for a show. I needed some help with my painting. I got two assistants to help me. They were students from the School of Plastic Arts of the University of Guadalajara. I set them up in a separate part of the studio and gave them the task of applying the first coats of color to assigned areas in the paintings. In the end, this idea didn´t work. Instead of making it easier, it made my work harder. Every evening after they left, I couldn’t stop myself from retouching the areas where they had applied paint. After completing this series, I never hired assistants again.
2009
Aside from owning the Pablo Guerrero Gallery, Pablo Guerrero was also part owner of the largest and most important ceramics workshop in Guadalajara. He mentioned to me that some of his clients when they saw photos of my paintings, thought at first glance that they were sculptures. He asked me if I would be interested in trying out my hand at creating ceramics; that I was welcome to visit the workshop, where I would be assisted by the artisans there. Of course, I was very interested, so I started frequenting the workshop and exploring new techniques for creating sculptures.
While working on modeling clay, I also had the opportunity to visit Tonalá, a town to the north of Guadalajara. Tonalá is known for its clay figurines, pottery, and sculptures. The making of clay figures in Tonalá extends far back into the pre-Hispanic era.
On the outskirts of town and up in the hills, I met a clan of artisans who dedicated themselves to making ceramics. After looking at their creations and discussing some ideas, we understood each other immediately. I started going there every day to create a series of terracotta sculptures. We worked as a band of jazz musicians, building up the forms at a rhythmic pace. Moving continuously around the large chunks of light-colored earth, we added bits here, took away there, made sections longer, smoothed areas out, making the figures progressively taller, ever more refined, until the sun set behind the hills and a rooster would sing. One of the artisans would start a fire, and another take out a bottle of Tequila. We would then sit around the fire in silence and contemplate the pieces in progress, now and then, commenting on what would need to be modified the next day. Working in Tonalá was a magical and memorable experience.
There, we created twenty-five large-format sculptures in terracotta, which I exhibited at the Pablo Guerrero Gallery, in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2009.
2010
It was around 4 am when I headed home on my pickup truck. After driving a few blocks, I suddenly realized I was going against traffic. Luckily, the Avenue was empty at that time of the night; there were no cars. I immediately made a U-turn to correct my course; lo and behold, a police patrol vehicle appeared. They detained me. The police officers, who looked quite scary, approached and asked me for my driver’s license (which meant a bribe payment). I told the officers I didn´t have any cash; I had spent it all at the bar. After arguing a bit to wriggle myself out of the situation, I invited them to my studio to have a drink. They willingly accepted and followed me to my studio. Once there, I opened my finest Tequila bottle, and we sat around a wicker table surrounded by paintings. Animated, we engaged in conversation; I explained to them my art while they described to me in full color their countless anecdotes and experiences while working in the police force. It turned out to be an extremely interesting encounter, where we had the opportunity to look at and compare our lives from the perspective of the eyes of law enforcement versus the eyes of an artist. We made toasts and drank until dawn, when they left, but not without first demanding the original bribe payment, which I thought was rather cheapish on their part. After all, I had shared my drinks and snacks with them. But I didn’t mind. The expense was worth the experience of getting to know the inner workings of corrupt minds.
I exhibited paintings and sculptures at the Juan Soriano Gallery in Guadalajara. During the exhibition, a woman called me; she was a Chilean named Marcela, an art dealer visiting Guadalajara to check out the art festival there. She came to my studio, where we drank lemonade and chatted for a while. She was very fond of my work. Years later, we would meet again in Chile, where she would exhibit my work at her gallery.
2010
How do oil spills affect the fish in the oceans?
To feel it happening, I first painted a ship, then I painted fish, then I filled in the ocean space with water, and finally, I pushed black paint off the ship’s deck and let it run, let it flow, let it scatter, break up, dissipate, and almost dissolve the fish under the water. These watercolors were all about how oil spills affect ocean fish.
2010
My paintings are about the world as I see it. I paint more according to what I think than how I feel. I paint my thoughts more than my feelings. Every once in a while, one needs to let go of everything that one knows and experiment with new possibilities to keep the creativity flowing. I painted a series of paintings where I left aside the realism of the human figure to focus on the forms rather than the content.
Years later, Patricia, the art dealer and picture framer, christened this series "Encuentros" when she organized an exhibition at the Museo Nacional del Tequila, in Tequila, Mexico, in 2015.
2011
I received an unexpected call. It was from my mother, whom I hadn't seen for quite some time. She was calling from the south of France. I flew to Carcassonne to meet her. When I arrived, I saw she was in dire shape, so I decided to stay in France to be closer. While looking for an apartment, I wandered into a restaurant and asked the owner if he knew of a place available for rent, and sure enough, he sent me to the building next door, where I found one. After signing a lease, I returned to the restaurant to thank the man for his recommendation, and we ended up chatting. He was surprised when I told him I was a painter. He told me he had an art gallery and invited me to see it. It turned out to be the best art gallery in Carcassonne. After a long talk, we set a date for an exhibition. The man's name was Baron Van de Tilcke; he was Russian and the owner of the building where his restaurant was located. He was also the chef.
The premises included a theater downstairs, where he would book the most innovative contemporary and classical experimental music orchestras. He was a highly cultured man, having traveled extensively during his lifetime. In addition to speaking Russian and French, he was fluent in English and Spanish. Passionate about painting, literature, music, politics, and mystical philosophies, he could be very funny or unabashedly rude. Still, he was always extremely generous, giving his all to support artists and art.
Baron Van de Tilcke provided me with a studio just above the restaurant. There I painted every day until noon when he would finish cooking, go out to the street below and shout up at me, "Time to eat!" at which point I would put my brushes aside and go downstairs to eat with him, sitting on the terrace. The food was delicious, the same food he would serve the clients when at 2 pm they would start coming through the door. This routine lasted until the day of the opening of my exhibition, which took place just a couple of blocks away at the Maison Du Chevalier-Galerie D'Art Contemporain, where a reporter from the newspaper L'Indépendant wrote an article entitled "The hard and soft world of Sebastian Picker."
From France to Chile
After the exhibition, I traveled back to Chile, the land where I was born and hadn’t visited for over forty years.