Angel Botello

 

 Angel Botello (1913 –1986) was a Spanish-Puerto Rican painter, sculptor and graphic artist. He was dubbed "The Caribbean Gauguin" for his use of bold colors and depictions of island life. Botello is considered one of the greatest Latin American post-modern artists and recognition and demand for his artwork continues to grow today, fetching unprecedented auction prices.
Angel Botello was a Spanish painter known for his use of vibrant colors and depictions of island life and people in Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. His work is often compared to Paul Gauguin, both for his focus on Caribbean women and for his use of bold lines and flat colors. Born on June 20, 1913 in Cangas de Morrazo, Spain, Botello fought for the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War and consequently fled the country to escape persecution from the Nationalists who won the war. The artist spent the rest of his life living in the Caribbean, though he often travelled to New York and France, and became a pioneer of the local art scene in Puerto Rico by opening one of the first art galleries on the island. 

 

Joan Miró

 

 Joan Miró (1893 –1983) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma de Mallorca in 1981.
Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism but with a personal style, sometimes also veering into Fauvism and Expressionism. He was notable for his interest in the unconscious or the subconscious mind, reflected in his re-creation of the childlike. His difficult to classify works also had a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and declared an "assassination of painting" in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.(Wikipedia)
"Via his own Surrealism-inspired exploration, Miró invented a new kind of pictorial space in which carefully rendered objects issuing strictly from the artist's imagination became juxtaposed with basic, recognizable forms. His use of interior emotion to drive abstract expression would become a great influence on the Abstract Expressionists.Even though he pared his forms to abstract schematics or pictorial signs and gestures Miró's art never settled into complete non-objectivity. Rather, he devoted his career to exploring various means by which to dismantle traditional precepts of representation.Miró balanced the kind of spontaneity and automatism encouraged by the Surrealists with meticulous planning and rendering to achieve finished works that, because of their precision, seemed plausibly representational despite their considerable level of abstraction.Miró often worked with a limited palette, yet the colors he used were bold and expressive. His chromatic explorations, which emphasized the potential of fields of unblended color to respond to one another, as well as his flat backgrounds with mild gradations of color, were valuable resources, providing inspiration for Color Field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler.Miró was a modern renegade who refused to limit himself to visual exploration in a single medium. While he explored certain themes such as that of Mother and Child repeatedly throughout his long career, he did so in a variety of media from painting and printmaking to sculpture and ceramics, often achieving surprising and disparate results."(theartstory.org)\

Inspirations

 

Darío Villalba Flores

Darío Villalba Flores ( 1939 –2018) was a Spanish painter, photographer.
"Darío Villalba lives and works in Madrid. He comes from a family with an artistic, intellectual and liberal profile, and at the age of eighteen decided to hold his first exhibition in the Alfil gallery in Madrid in the same year – 1957 – as he embarked on his studies at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, combining them with other courses in Law and Philosophy and Letters. It was during this period that he began to devote himself to his first photographs.
In the mid-1960s, Darío Villalba began using photography in his works, although he does not consider himself to be a photographer as, for him, photography is a medium, a technique he uses as a vehicle for transmitting attitudes and emotions. This decontextualization of photography was a pioneering attitude for this age, a medium through which the artist reflects on the return to the spirit of painting through photographic technique. In the words of the artist himself, “In my work, painting is photography and photography is painting “.
In 1970 he presented some photos of figures inside transparent pink methacrylate at the XXXV Venice Biennial, the “encapsulados rosas”, emulsified with paint, which marked his artistic career. His work became increasingly intimate, his process increasingly complex, developing into a self-analysis with a desire for introspection. Currently his artistic production includes painting, photography, objects, installations, sculptures, style opposed to the non-style characteristic of his work.His work is present in both Spanish and foreign collections.."(.esbaluard.org)

Photography 

Manolo Millares - Tachisme - European Abstract Art

Manolo Millares (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, 17 January 1926 – Madrid, 14 August 1972) was a Spanish painter. Self-taught as an artist, Millares was introduced to Surrealism in 1948. In 1953, he moved to Madrid and became an abstract painter. In 1957, Millares along with Antonio Saura and Pablo Serrano founded the avant-garde group El Paso (The Step) in Madrid. After showing his work in San Pablo in 1957, Millares' work was introduced to the United States in 1958. He attained an international reputation by the early 1960s, and had a solo show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1961.In Madrid, Millares was associated with ‘The Informalists’, a group of artists including Antoni Tàpies, Enrique Tábara, Antonio Saura, Laurent Jiménez-Balaguer and Aníbal Villacís among many others who insisted that art should be removed from theory and concept. To these artists, the gesture used to make a painting was all-important. In the 1950s, Millares began to make dramatic collages from found materials, especially burlap.Relatives include his son Pascual Millares, and other relatives Angel Manuel Millares, Angel Manuel Millares Jr., Javier Millares, Michelle Millares, and Mia Marie Millares.Wikipedia