I think what I like about Guayasamin is that his work is so emotional. Many of his paintings are sad but beautiful. They make you think. They make you feel. I love that. Each one I look at pulls me in and makes me wonder  about the emotions on each face. Am I reading their emotions correctly or did Guayasamin mean something else totally different?

His use of large hands is so interesting. . Maybe because we use our hands and a means of communicating. He did several series on just hands. Hands depicting emotion such as love, anger, fear.
and protest. Here is a link where you can quickly view them. http://www.guayasamin.org/pages_ing/index.htmlhttp://www.guayasamin.org/pages_ing/index.html

They say that the first thing we look at when communicating is the face and second the hands.
Interesting!



Guayasamin's painting of the lovers is my very favorite and I have painted it several times in different manners. When I was browsing my extensive collection of artists photos for a background painting for this composition, I came across one of Oswaldo's paintings of masks. I understand that he had an extensive collection from all over the world including his own sculptures. I fell in love with this piece for obvious reasons. He is another artist that liked to use brilliant colors as you well know I do. If you look closely you will see that all of the mask faces are blending one into the other almost as one
unit yet there are 10 faces. This painting called for a large canvas of 24 x 24 inches  to appreciate the details and colors.



When I was painting all of those faces I was wondering who the faces were painted after. Where they his friends, where they his relatives, lovers or just strangers. Needless to say this is how the theme and the tile were born for this painting - ' Lovers and Other Strangers"




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Oswaldo Guayasamín (6 July 1919, Quinto, Ecuador  – 10 March 1999, Baltimore, United States was a Quechua Indian and Ecuadorian master painter.

Oswaldo Guayasamín was born in Quito,to a native father and a Mestiza mother, both of Quechua descent.[His family was poor and his father worked as a carpenter for most of his life. He later worked as a taxi and truck driver. He was the first child of ten children in his family. When he was young, he enjoyed drawing caricatures of his teachers and the children that he played with. He showed an early love for art. He created a Pan-American art of human and social inequalities which achieved international recognition.

He graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Quito as a Painter and  sculptor. He also studied architecture there. He held his first exhibition when he was 23, in 1942. While he was attending college, his best friend died during a demonstration in Quito. This incident would later inspire one of his paintings, "Los Niños Muertos." This event also helped him to form his vision about the people and the society that he lived in.

His death on March 10, 1999 was marked by a day of national strikes by the indigenous people (whom he spent his life supporting) and other sectors of society, and was considered a great loss to Ecuador. He is still lauded as a national treasure.

In 2002, three years after his death, Oswaldo's masterwork,  La Capilla Del Hombre("The Chapel of Man"), was completed and opened to the public. The Chapel is meant to document not only man's cruelty to man but also the potential for greatness within humanity. It is co-located with Guayasamín's home in the hills overlooking Quito.

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