Canvas, Music and Poetry (Personal Project)
“Color and sound cannot be compared, but both can be reduced to a higher formula. They are two rivers that spring from the same mountain and flow through two regions under completely different conditions.”
Goethe
Since I began developing in the world of photography, I have felt the need to establish, through my work, a link between the creative discipline that I am passionate about and painting, the great passion of my mother. I didn’t know how or when to do it, but that desire has always been within me.
At the dawn of my learning, fate wanted me to meet David Santiago and Juan Tapia, two great figures in photography who were precisely immersed in the purpose of developing, sharing, and teaching photographic techniques and “ways of looking” at nature through the lens, to create works of a personal or AUTHOR character.
To do so, they focused on pictorial movements and the great painters who helped shape and spread them. Impressionism, abstract expressionism, surrealism, minimalism, or romanticism were and are present in their talks, workshops, and, of course, in their work.
A canvas is a linen, cotton, or hemp fabric that usually serves as a support for pictorial works, which is why the term canvas also refers to the set of these works once they have been applied to the fabric. This project stems from the idea of transferring that concept to photography and selecting the “fabrics on which to paint with the lens” from among the basic elements of nature. My “canvases” are made on Water, Ice, Mud, Sludge, Sand, Rock, Wall, Metal, Wood, Sky, Leaves, and Magueys (Agaves).
Since ancient times, human beings have felt the urgent need to convey ideas, concepts, and feelings through drawings, marks, colors, words, and sounds—whether with implicit or explicit, semantic, or symbolic meaning. It was within this urgency that I found my next—and even more challenging—challenge: attempting to give my canvases and images a poetic undercurrent, where colors, light, and forms would converge with sound and words. Where compositions and rhythms would speak to one another.
According to an ancient Chinese legend, the sounds of words and the notes of the musical scale were suggested to an artist by two multicolored birds. In this simple story, the basic elements of art are contemplated and explained: color in the feathers of the magical birds, sound in their poetic song, and nature, which inspired and stimulated that man to create.
Color—before it became painting or photography—sounds, and the earliest poetic songs have always been present in people’s lives. And nature itself, which we have always sought to emulate, dominate, and surpass through art, is a whole exaltation of sound and color.
We know firsthand that a sound, a word, or a verse can awaken chromatic images. And that contemplating a painting or a photograph can, in turn, evoke sounds and texts. It is not merely a matter of sensory perception but a complex act of thought in which memories and abstract ideas also play a role.
Music, poetry, and painting or photography are expressions inherent to human nature. They complement and ally themselves in a creative blend that is difficult to dissolve. There is influence and connection between the colors of images and the sounds of words, between the musicality and rhythm of poetry and certain paintings or photographs, between pictorial or photographic works and the verses they “give birth to” (not merely illustrating them), whether or not they become songs, or between a poem and an image that sparked the imagination.
In painting, photography, music, and poetry, rhythm and space, proportion, perspective, point of view, and repertoires of images or words are addressed. And so is tone. Picasso, who not only painted but also wrote almost compulsively, said that “painting is poetry; it is written in verse with plastic rhymes.”
This is what I have tried—and still try—to achieve with this work: to unite poetic composition, whether or not it is set to music, and chromatic expression, and to embody them on the canvases that nature provides.
This personal project is dedicated to David and Juan, my teachers and friends, for their inspiration, continuous teachings, and infinite patience and generosity. Above all, it is a tribute to my mother, who among all the things she has passed down to me has given me her passion for art, and to the memory of my father, whom I resemble so much.
“Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes the precise moment. We play with things that disappear and, once they have disappeared, it is impossible to bring them back.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson
