BACK Eddy Ochoa Guzmán

WHEN THE SUN SETS AT NIGHT
by Reinaldo Cedeño Pineda

Summary:

“ An artist’s hand can change anything”. Stories of a police  officer and a paint brush. The misterious light of his night landscapes. “Someone has told me: I want to be in one of your paintings. The supreme beauty of water. A song writer painter”.

  A tiny piece of Cuban culture in the mids of the city is Eddy Ochoa  Guzmán’s home. In a corner the malanga plant( Arum Sagitae Folium ) parades the fresh green, wide leaf; or a dwarf-like tree, a bonsai, presses the little fruits against a toy trunk; or the singing bird knows how to sing to the sun.
 A cactus plant, a collection of which overran his place with flowers and thorns can still be seen.   
 Between painting and music, with a child’s spirit in a feverish activity, life has caught him by surprise at the age of 50. And that makes him happy. His landcapes have a soothing effect.         The artist has learned to gather the river from within, and  has been able to paint it with outside colors.
 
NATURE WAS A FEAST FOR ME

  The Yumuri river, by the Alto del Fuerte, in the Baracoa woods   was inmense for the boy. He was born on December, 27, 1952; between myth and history on a location  where a former Spanish fort was built.
 “Right now I have this ambience in my mind. I felt both, love and panic for the river, and I have those memories stuck in my mind like no other. Nature was my feast.”
  His father was a rebel army  soldier in the Sierra Maestra mountains and his family moved to Santiago de Cuba, capital city for the Oriente province when the revolution triumphed.       Eddy was only eight years old, and thought he would adapt to a radical change in his living environment; the lights in his mind would never go out.
 He was granted a scholarship in Havana, and then decided to apply for entrance to the San Alejandro Arts Academy, but by chance he was sent to the School of Fine Arts in Pinar del Rio, the western most  province in the country.
 An event that would have been frustrating enough for anybody, turned out to be a meet with the land of the best tobacco in the world, and also a gathering with a region of exceptional landscape possibilities.
 The tobacco plantations, the palm trees, the orchids, have found a fertile ground along a topography of isolated hummocks otherwise known as the Viñales Valley.
   Even though he stayed for a short time, beauty played its part and opened his eyes.
 “I learned a lot from master Domingo Ramos and his landscapes on the Valley. Every day I used to stop by and see his technique at work. When I was in Santiago, Alejandro Rodríguez helped me a lot. He was and excellent painter and quite a rebel as to his criteria. He told us to take some extra time to paint landscapes at school, and I learned a few details with him”.
  For over two years he studied in the José Joaquín  Tejada  Arts School, though his training would bloom mostly through his  self-teaching. There were some who would look down on landscape painting.
   “I came accross modern painting abruptly in Santiago de Cuba. They rejected me a bit, so I had a rough time, but I was lucky enough to have painters Ferrer Cabello and Aguilera Vicente to support what I did ”.
 “ There was one time when I said I had some trouble getting materials and Aguilera Vicente showed up with a set of Chinese brushes. It was like a boost as when you are in a raft in the middle of a river and someone pushes you into the other bank”.

A WHITE AND BLUE COUNTERPOINT.

 However, art’s roads seemed to dissapear as he joined the police force. However, nature had left a fast mark that prevailed.
 There are even anecdotes which tell of people who would not understand such dycotomy.
“ Once, I arrived in a place dressed as a police officer, and some people who did not know me, were surprised. And then there was a kind of contest set up among the people in the place: Italians, French, Americans and Cubans to determine if anybody knew of any police officer who would paint”.

--And the outcome?

“ Well at least over there nobody knew of anybody. Some did not understand my point. When I was on duty, I painted landscapes and if they asked me, I would accept willingly”.
 “Due to the nature of my work, I had to travel to the municipalities, and then I filled myself with the images I saw”.
“ In my landscape phase, my paintings looked like women with long hair. This idea came to me as I was heading to the Dos Bocas town, because there was a mountain that looked like a woman’s loose hair, in a natural background with palm trees”.
 “ Landscape artists have to look around a lot, to commit to memory all the elements that may help them later on. I usually used a centropen  ( using ink ) to paint because it was easier to do it in my office than set up everything to paint with oil. In fact, it was quite odd to see a police officer painting”.
  In a sort of counterpoint between green and blue, between the color of his uniform and his fondness for the color of nature, he managed to live with both things.
    As an an artist, in the long run, he learned to get the best of it, and in in the end,  made both ends overlap as he started to paint John Does’ pictures, in a vital effort to identify people as part of his work.
  “ The John Does picture is but a graphic description of a person you have not seen,  and then you paint it with crayon. This has to do with the psychological framework and memory of a person; it depends on the person’s age and the time of day when the event took place. When I started over, there were no computers, we painted everything ourselves, and on a number of occasions they called me over to paint more complex cases”.
 One time it was about a criminal event, and the key witness had not seen the perpetrator’s face. Imagination and the artist’s talent would play a fundamental role to the service of justice then.
 “It occured to me to ask the witness if the perpetrator had any resemblance with anybody he knew, and using the reference and a photo and other elements I drew the face. Later on I learned the criminal had been arrested. I painted everything with my hands. A computer can be very sophisticated; however you have to use your hand as there may be peculiar or difficult  features hard to paint unless by hand, or you may get a lifeless image otherwise”.
“I still believe there are certain features, certain shades...which are dealt with like chiaroscuro, it is better to achieve them without the computer, and these features would tell apart a person from another one”.

GREEN AND BLACK CONTROVERSY.

   Though he was part of over twenty group exhibitions with other painters  since 1975 , Ochoa’s personal exposition ( Two Sides of the Landscape ) was launched in 1989 at the Elvira Cape public library, in Heredia, Santiago’s cultural street.
 Ochoa’s son, named after him and majoring in History of Arts, holds a learned criteria about his father:
“ He is very honest by defending the landscape as a topic for his art, from an exultant view, defending beauty and to the rescue of nature”.
 “ I look  at nature from an ecological point of view, there are no humans in my paintings. Sometimes I paint a road a man has been through, because man in a zest to live, and develop, changes and most of the time damages the environment.
 Landscapes will always be painted, because man longs for the environment, he is always searching”.
 “ You have to learn to look at places in the right manner. You can take pictures, but today it is difficult to take an easel and leave for the country. Photos are my sketches and from there I start to paint a landscape. There is the presence of water in some of my paintings; water has a matchless beauty and is a source of life”.
 “ I painted the location around the San Juan River; it’s a river that people walk by and never see. I started to bring it back to life, and created  the landscape’s natural environment, as how it would have looked. People have asked me if I painted a landscape fron the Sierra Maestra: but the inflowing streams  to the San Juan are sewage waters. The artist’s hand can change everything”.

---There is a wild frenzy of green in your paintings, there is an outgrowth...
   
“ Yes, I create a foliage, I bring it up to life, and want it to look as real as possible. Instead of details, I develop exuberance. I love to paint very thick foliage: it is pure green pleasure”.
 “ I know of a New York painter named Peter Coe who used to say that he lived in a steel and concrete city, where people missed the country a great deal. They see trees only in pictures or “inprisonned trees” in  parks, caged like birds”.
 “ In music, people who compose classical music, think their music is the only really cultivated music there is, the  rest is not. The same can be said of dancing, ballet and folcklor; but in the end, man always love nature and the human figure. I paint for people who know about art and for the ones who attend a gallery for the first time. Some one told me once: ‘ I would like to be inside one of your paintings’.
“Art is supposed to fill people with beauty; they should feel the freshness of the landscape in this violent world we live in. Landscapes are a touch of harmony of bliss. Landscape painting is no easy task”.
 
--However, beyond this exuberance, we have witnessed something unique: night landscapes. Why?

“ Almost everyone does daylight paintings; but one day as I was hospitalized, I looked through the window  and there was this lighthouse that illuminated a spot in the landscape. I said to myself: it’s amazing how man can artificially illuminate part of the landscape that can not be seen”.
 “When I paint lights in a landscape, there is no doubt that beyond this there are other things that exist despite the fact that they can  not be seen”.

---And what is the attraction of night landscapes ?
 
“ The charm of it lies in achieving the force of light, within the dark side of the landscape”.
 
---And can there be light within darkness?

“ I search for that light, I place that light artifiacially in a spot, it comes from a mystical place. A different landscape; that’s why I have have attracted people’s attention in the world of lanscape painting. I never quite liked to be like the others ”.
  “ Landscapes have been painted in a thousand manners but this is a new way of looking at it ”.

---Some people say it is very difficult to paint a landscape of Cuba, unless under the influence of Cuban world-known painter Tomás Sanchéz. To what extent do you accept such assertion?

“ They also say that when you think about doing something, Tomás Sanchez already did it. These are the reverent opinions of critics, due to the magnitude of his work. For me his art is sublime. I can percieve a certain touch in his work, a bit of primitive, if you will. He achieves elements that an academy painter is not able to and puts in details that one is unable to see at the distance you choose, and that’s very interesting for me. I feel his influence but I do my own paintings”.

A FLOWER FEAST

  Eddy Ochoa is grateful and is a knight; but when  challenged, he takes up the gauntlet. He does not call the world to praise him, he knows how to touch it from the canvass.
 Dominican Republic, the neighboring caribbean island, has opened its galleries for him. Expositions like Infinite Presence  and Midnight Dreams  were highly praised by critics and the public. However his dreams of creation do not end there.
 On many occassions when he is painting, he may listen to a tune, and right on, he puts down the brush and sings along with the tape recorder.
During midnight the music elf also comes to him. His wife can tell about it as  she has been startled on numberless occassions when he gets out of bed. She is responsible for some of the water falls he paints.
  Ochoa also heads the Primavera project, a musical training program for kids and some of his songs have been acclaimed nationally in the Cantando al Sol Festival, the most important music for children event in Cuba.
 And even destiny wanted to have one of his songs played on Cuban television to bid farewell to the millenium in a huge children’s chorus: How beautiful Santiago looks! It looks like a sewsaw!...How beautiful it is!
His grand daughter is a sight to see as she and her frieds dance to  grandpas’s  rythm.

---Where is the relationship between children’s songs and painting?

“I love beauty in the world, the virginal, and children in their manner of thinking are as virginal as the landscape, they are not polluted”.

         Dear little friend I invite you
         to the party of flowers,
         where colors
         will be shared,
         and it will be like in dreams
         we have to fall asleep....

          ( A Feast of Flowers, Eddy Ochoa )

---If you were to choose right now, between painting and music, which would you choose?

“I am a painter, but a painter who composes songs.