Luis Joaquin Rodríguez Ricardo: In his own words

(reprinted from MAGIC ART IN CUBA by Gérald Mouial)

I respect religion very much. I received a Catholic education, I attend church, and I believe in the Virgin. My saint is the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre [the patron saint of Cuba, known as Occhún in Santería]. Therefore, I have never sold a painting with the image of that Virgin, nor will I.

My family lives by my painting. I never thought I would paint. I wanted to be a pilot, but in the last year of high school, I felt like I lost my career and a part of my life. After I graduated, I entered the army. From that moment on, my life changed completely. When I was in high school I had a girlfriend who lived not very far from my home. I was so in love with her that I tried everything in order to see her. Since my father had always painted, one day I took the paint brushes and canvas, and I tried to paint the place where my girlfriend lived. That was my first painting and I think it was horrible. That was in 1984.

I was born in Marcané, Alto Cedro, and I grew up in Mella. When I left the army in 1987, I went to Holguin to live there. Since I didn’t know anyone in Holguin, I began to paint. I studied and earned a degree in airport and highway construction.

I worked in that area for about three years. When the “special period” began, there was a staff reduction and I was sent to work in agriculture, so I began making sculptures. I felt very good doing that, but it was very difficult and besides, the sculpture had to be sold for very little. So when I’d saved some money, I began painting what I wanted. The woman I married in Holguin decided to go to Miami in 1995. I came back to Mella where I stayed for only a year. There I met Luisa and now I’ve lived in Santiago de Cuba since. I have one son.

My sources of inspiration were, until recently, moments I had lived, spiritual rituals, religious problems, things that had happened in my town, the people of the town, etc. Sometimes those things seemed a little ridiculous to me, but I saw them as interesting and picturesque enough to develop as themes in my paintings. Now I have moved on to other themes too.

I found inspiration in the fact that the crocodile eats frogs, the big one always eats the little one. The frog is a very inoffensive and noble animal, but besides that, it is very defenseless for living in such a hostile environment as water. The crocodile is always waiting.

I think I have found inspiration in my father too.My father is a very noble person. I cannot find a logical explanation for the things that happen to him. I say to him, “You are too passive for the aggressive world we are living in today.”

My father and I talk a lot about how to classify our style. We believe that we are artists, although some people think differently. They are free to say whatever they want, but we are free to create whatever we feel and whatever we want, even without a conceptual foundation. . . .

From Cuba, I prefer the work of Manuel Mendive. In my opinion, he is one of the few contemporary Cuban painters who actually knows how to support a Cuban artistic tendency that relates to our culture, tradition and idiosyncracies. . . .

I have tried to paint more about the social system than about the revolution itself, about things that have influenced me and about the unfortunate living conditions of some of the people I grew up with in the countryside. When I was little, I lived in a neighborhood of Haitians, there were only three or four white families. Those people worked in agriculture and sugar cane and sacrificed so much, I know of their hard work and their dedication. Their work was very hard and very badly paid so they lived in very difficult conditions. Because of that I did the painting “The road is not rosy,” an interesting and polemic painting.

We think that places that are so poor and where people live in tough conditions is the world, but within that poverty and that world there are many beautiful things that have inspired us.

We have a project called “For a better world,” and it is an exhibition of Mella painters, led mainly by my father and me. That exhibition was first held in La Confronta Gallery in Santiago and then we took it to Philadelphia.

I work with UNEAC [the Cuban Artists and Writers Union]. I’ve been an independent artist for many years. I paint every day, seven days a week, from seven in the morning to six in the evening, until daylight vanishes.

I have tried to emphasize nature in my painting because we wanted the For a Better World project to be sensitive to nature. I’ve also started a project about Santiago de Cuba, its architecture, its mountains, its sea.

I don’t think that our painting style gets the recognition it deserves. There are very good naive painters in Cuba but since they don’t have a formal education, they are discriminated against, in the sense that there is no naive artist represented in the contemporary art salons or the Havana Biennial. I don’t know if that discrimination is conscious or unconscious. We have tried to exhibit our work in the Havana galleries several times but it has been difficult, so instead we’ve tried to get our work shown around the world, where we’ve had more recognition. . . .