BACK Joherm Quiala Brooks

 I DREAM ONE OF MY PAINTINGS WILL BE ONE DAY NEXT TO ONE BY DALI.
Blessed by the Pope. A window to a rebel personality. Every person has his own color and flavor. “I am the eternally alert, of the ones who has got a second skin in store”. The artist as a chronicler of the times. “A black man has to be as authentic as possible”.

By Reinaldo Cedeño Pineda

 A gigantic cross was erected a few meters off the colossal equestrian statue of the Cuban hero Antonio Maceo. The rebel history for the independence and the history of the church convenened in the  year’s premiere. In the Revolution Square in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba’s patron saint, the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, would be crowned by His holyness John Paul II.
 The popemobil had travelled forcefully its way through the morning heat, drove around the place and its occupant descended the vehicle and into the crowded service. But the sun faithfully followed him and managed to put a ray of light through the throne set up for the occassion, to the very chair the Pope would sit on.
 Members from the churches of the Cuban Eastern region were there and they were singing at the top of their voice.  A delegation from the  most eastern  region of Cuba, from Guantanamo slowly made their way through the green marble steps to salute the sovereign from the world’s smallest state: The Vatican.
 Joherms Quiala Brooks carried a painting by himself on his hands, this congretation’s  present to the Vicar of God.
----Bless me father.....and his lips kissed the papal ring.
The Pope, Karol Josef Wojtyla, looked at a painting--an integration of the Virgin and nature.
 He looked at the painter and lightly bowed as way of appreciation. He made the sign of the cross with and elderly hand and touched the artist’s head.
 The Catholic Church in Guantanamo on the occassion of this visit, had set up a contest, as an activity for the occassion, and Quiala had been the fortunate one.
“ I will always ask myself  why were there so many people to see the Pope, I can tell you that all of them were not religious. I was not a believer myself and I was there. To welcome a state leader by one’s own will is something magical. To be near him, to receive his blessing personally, and to present him with one of my works, by force it had to set off a stage in my life.
 “There were many people, nothing more could have happened but that was enough for me, not because I believe in this man’s supernatural powers, but because he is a man many people believe in, and because he is not an imposesed leader. This is what added importance to the event. That is how I felt it and then I asked myself: ‘ I am a member of this church led by him?’.
 “ The date coincided with my birthdate, January 24, 1998, I turned 28 , Then I told myself: ‘This cannot be any coincidence”
“ Something like that had happened to me before, in your birthdate you set yourself goals, because you are a year older and you leave experiences behind. I sat down and  talked to myself, and tried to figure out things from that day and started to study religion. Just today I keep attending church”.

----And how much of the religious part do you really preserve, beyond such an impression ? How much of the mythical or the devotional  pervades your work ?.

“ I started by the catholic church as part of my cultural education but I am planning to go through as many churches as possible to identify my true spirit as a believer, because I do know that I have a spirit, and I am so lucky to reflect it in my work”.
 
AN “ENTHUSIASTIC AND UNQUIET”ADOLESCENCE.

Poet Regino Boti, from his poetry made a finished and living portrait of this city. He baptized it a village, all the more his home village!... I love your catalanan sullenness*** and your straight streets”.
 The city--almost a perfect reticulum-- is granted the official charter in 1871, although there is evidence demostrating there lived such brave people before that time around the region who were able to fight off an  English landing on the bay region.
 The official state oblivion was notorious  well into the XX century and today it is the capital city of a province named likewise.
    A sculpture of a myhtological lady, known as La Fama, by Américo Chini--an italian artist-- has been chosen as the symbol of the city by popular acclaim. And this is no chance since  she has been watching over the Guantanamo people from the cupola of the once Salcines palace, the residence of celebrated architect and engineer José de Jesús Leticio Salcines and Morlote.
 Traces of West Indian migration--from Jamaica and other English speaking countries and Haiti--can be found everywhere, in the blood, in the last names, the race, and the culture in Guantánamo.
 Precisely one of the most universal songs: The Guantanamera, was dedicated to a girl from the local region. The bay, ample and gifted with excellent natural resources, is occupied by a U.S. military base; to the South  the Guaso river crosses through the city, and provides the  the Guaso Village name to the city.
 This is the region where the artist was born, “ between the sea and the mountains”. Art would come to him from a strong inclination, not from the family, though grandpa Nicomedes, was among  the few well trained  cabinet makers.
 The Fine Arts School saw his graduation at the age of 14 though his inclination dated back almost 10 years. It was not odd at all to see his father, his uncles or his mother--professor Milagros--arrive home smiling with a box of colored pencils or a notebook knowing the celebration it meant for the little boy.
 Still fresh in his mind, his teachers to whom he is ever so thankful. Professors like Ernesto Cuesta and George Pérez “who took me in and put up with my unquiet and enthusiastic adolescence, because sometimes it is hard for a professor to determine if his pupil has too much energy or is really ill-disciplined”.   
  “As a teenager, I had my questions and I needed  answers
and it was not always easy to convince me. Some were bothered by the fact that I used to say I wanted to grow up. That perhaps created a criterion about my personality and I grew up in this atmosphere”.
  However, when he passed the entry exams for the National School of Fine Arts in the capital city, a female professor invited him over to have a soda at home; but that was  no simple soda, it was a spring of knowledge:  
 ‘---Joherms, you will be away from home, a place where there will be people who do not know you or your family. You have to grow up to be a man’.         
 They opened a window to the world for him...a thousand miles from his home town.
“ I set down goals for myself, everything was so much harder, I crashed into different idiosincracies, every region has its own characteristics. I was even a more rebellious youth. The affectionate part was much more isolated for me, and you had to impose  yourself, as a student and as a human being”.
 “I started to study specialized and updated books and information . I could attend Biannual Fine Arts  Meets, movie and theater festivals...and my cultural background increased; but my aggressiveness was not accepted completely.. and then you find a limited group like yourself, people your own race”.
 All of this brought about contradictions which were  eliminated two years later, this time with a thousand miles trip to Santiago de Cuba.
 
--Maybe if we see it today in the light of the years passed, your training in two schools was fortunate, for its own sake. Wasn’t it?
 
“ Havana was a school of trends, very much updated with what is happening in the world nowadays, and it was easy to see how the student body was inclined to doing what was happening in the world , and there was the latest literature available”. 
 “ Santiago was a different school, a school marching on with the ‘ticker’, with the heart. I had to resettled myself, because the philosophy of the students is different. In Santiago, the professors were younger, and I believe they wanted to have in the classrooms not only pupils but also human beings”.
 “In Santiago, I have memories about Carlos René Aguilera, one of the first painters in Cuba and his father José Julian Aguilera Vicente. The latter, just to see him, it was  marvelous, a gift from life”.
  “ Also in my memory I have an excellent engraver: Arturo Salazar. And there were others who were not my teachers, as Julia Vadés and Mayito Trenard. I believe all of this really helped me, it enriched my personality. Today I know up to where I can get, and when to preserve my strengths”.
    In 1989, Joherms Quiala Brooks majored as an engraving and drawing teacher from the José Joaquin Tejada Fine Arts Academy. Life kept moving on. Now another task awaited him which surely would find for him more than one “unquiet and enthusiastic”teenager to his own image and resemblance...and he would see that reasom always find its way.

---Do you have any experiences in this area?

“ Almost by force, I have to speak about another stage in my life when I took my degree; my own personal life takes on another color, and then I had to face students, I had to do what other people did for me; but well as a teacher I really worked for a short period of time”.
 
---Did you meet any student that reminded you of yourself at that age?

“ Well yes, I found some who were like me, at least there were some with the same energy... And I talked to them, and gave them some advice, I never spoke of cutting off or smothering that energy.   

---Why are you an engraver, not a painter?

“ I was always a painter, but on the advice of a professor I decided to pass on the next academic level as an engraver, because it was easier. Today I want to go back to what I majored in but engraving is very expensive, due to the materials, the paper that has to be of a certain thickness, the inks, the equipment, the acids, plates, woods...
 “Then there is also the point with the fact that we need to produce something that needs to be bought, and for engraving you have to have a specialized and planned market, it’s difficult. And then fight to succeed, but I was always a painter”.
 Back in Guantanamo, Quiala runs a gallery in the small municipality of Manuel Tames, in a particularly difficult period of time, with marked financial difficulties and a rough nature against him. A land always longing for water.
 “ My job as a director did not leave much time for creation or participation in events or attend any gallery, almost nothing, and then I decided to become what is known in the world of Fine Arts a freelance artist”.

 A SCREAM OR A SONG?

   Curiously enough, in this young artist there seems to coincide two great spirits--maybe siamese by nature--which complement each other: sometimes they branch off, make their way all the time and finally they fuse together.
 There is the Quiala who is looking for an excellence of his art well inside himself, the philosopher by whose thoughts he seems to be twice his own age and the designer of his own future.
 ...And the careless neigbour, not a school painter, well settled and integrated in a neigbourhood “where you can find anything, people from different walks, different colors and hairdos”.
 “ A neigborhood where you can find all the smells of life, all of that  has to do with my life and surely with my future. A neigbourhood of low-income people, without the  big facades, where you have to rough it and fight”.
 
--Can you elaborate on the “colors and hairdos of the people”

“ Any time, you have to identify the color you have. For instance, if you arrive in your office and you had a problem before..people demand things from you, without ever asking. That demand on the part of the people creates a mood which can be receptive or defensive. All of us do not have this awareness or are not able to identify the color or enviromental flavor we can create, accordintg to the circumstances.
 “ Right now there is an exchange between the two of us, we change the color and the flavor when you ask and I answer, you present an idea and I explain. In the end it is not something physical or anatomical; it is something very personal and it is in my work.
 “ There is an example in The Seller of Wealth. This man’s environment can not be poetic or picturesque, because in the background there is a landscape but the color changed, because he sells what he can not try himself”.
His work contains all the strength his character transpires.
To observe it, can produce a certain itching, but he does not want to steal light or shadows from the times he has been forced to live in.
 His authenticuty is not to be taken lightly. Sometimes it is poignant but it is always transparent. ( The Wealth of the Skin:  Ahand ripping through the landscape to reveal what is behind ) Eros bathes his work.
 There is quite a lot of  topic reshuffling and contextual remakings he has established  with famous works in his painting or photos, either Cuban or universal.
 It would be noteworthy to single out a work by the title Toy , a doubly simbolic appropiation of the world famous Cuban photographer Alberto Korda. Now in his painting the little girl presses a Coca Cola can.
 At home, his photos, and half-painted pictures keep you company from the living room to the backyard, a sample of constant endeavor, of ever growing requests and high boiling ideas. His son Olaph is already scratching papers.
 “Every man is his own time’s son. Our Apostle José Martí  said it, and it is my turn as an artist to speak of the events which have marked the idiosincracy of Cubans in the last years, how the dollar bursted in, the economic difficulties.       Artists are like chroniclers, but there there are some who take it to the most lyrical end and there are others who take it to the rawest part, or using more tecnique, that is what it is all about.
 
---Haven’t you felt fear that this stressed reference to a concrete context may bring about a premature caducity or may isolate you from more universal publics?

“ No, because the universality of an artist’s work is  given by a process. It would be a hypocricy that an artist’s ambition  be centered from the very beginning to achieve a universal language for his work; first there should be a process of finding the validity of his work, a point on which to support that universality.
 “ It would be a bit sad to try to escape what is affecting you directly, to try to reach what may take years to reach.               It would be beneficial if the evolutionary process in my work would be seen from the very roots of it. I was not and am not disturbed by speaking about an inmediate context, and today I am still living in it”.
 
--Is your work a scream or a song?

“ It is the first time recognizes it in an artist’s work: but it is only logical that the stages in an artist’s life are reflected in his work. It all depends on the psychological, on the circumstancial, and social values that surround the artist. And if I am a great communicator, I have to reflect that and I think I have achieved that, sometimes with a song, sometimes with a scream”.

---Paradoxically with this line of thought,  Guantánamo does not seem to appear in your work, at least in the most important part of it...

“If  we talk conceptually, you’ll never find Guantánamo, because what I am most grateful about it is that it has forged my personality, rebel as it is; it was born here.
 “Formally, my purpose is to reflect Guantánamo’s face, my view of Guantánamo’s face, it has to be remade, because now I have a better criterion, I am more professional that a few years when I did a series, but that was a romantic look of a city, a look of a person who has not actually discovered all of it”.

-- An intellectual from Guantánamo once said the charms in the city lie behind the walls. Is that your opinion? Have you searched these charms?

“ You have to be well inside, dig really deep; but it has always been my believe that in the most dramatic moment, in  the toughest of places, if you know how to search well, you can find a moment of poetry, something that can make you dream”.
 
Is this dialogue of yours always so critical with the landscape?         

“ You are talking to a person who hated landscapes when I was a student. In class, I painted grass or a tree trunk, not the whole tree. Today due to the circumstances I have been made to change my formal formula in terms of  works of art. But my thing is not to reproduce nature pictorically, I rather have the landscape speak, or defend itself or act.
“ Landscapes are not what surrounds you all the time, but the reason for you to be there. Now, I paint from photos that I take myself or that come my way. I make photography to coincide with my own line of work.
“ Generally speaking, when it comes to painting, I dream of my painting, then I do it. I am living through a stage in which I do not do sketches.We have to take our time to detach ourselves from dogmas or school methodologies. Today I try to make the dream come true, but I do not waste paper, I spend time dreaming: I memorize images.

--And more often than not you paint yourself. Aren’t you sort of abusing your own ego, or is it a need to reaffirm your own personality?
 
  “Yes, I also paint myself. There is an ego in every human being, if I paint the people around me, I should tell how I am and what I expect from myself. It is a normal thing, it is a drive, there is nothing planned beforehand.
 
--What percentage have you been able to recognize in your personality about the fact that you are black, if you have recognized it, of course? And where can we find that in your paintings?

“We owe ourselves to a tropicality and that obviously activates the use of colors, colors that have to do with the very concept of a message. It is my duty to express myself as an artist, but before that I am black, and I can’t deny it. It would be downright ignorance to overlook that.
 The first thing you get from a person is an impression  and that is how I manisfest myself.
 If I can not direct my thoughts and actions I could not speak of an intention to achieve succeess. A black man has to be as authentic as possible, he should not be pressed by anything, he has to be himself absolutely.
 We black people have to do something for ourselves, or else we will continue to be the forgotten ones. I always have a message for the people my race; people should point a finger to us for the beautiful things we do. There is also beauty beyond the white roses”.

THE DALISIAN PLAGUE.

“Every morning when I wake up, I experience a supreme  pleasure”. And that has not been enough, because the Spanish artist ( 1904-1989 ) has expressed his name was Salvador ( saviour ) “because he was predestined to save painting from the  death threat of abstractionists, academic surrealism, dadaism in general, and all the anarchic “isms”.
Sometimes the genious and the maniac are mixed, the exentric painter with long moustaches who paraded through the world as if it were his own living room.
 The creator of “Giraffes in Flames” , the elephants with spider legs and “still living life” laughs at time and geography, with a value in his paintings that has rarely been achieved.
 “ The contact with Dali has been only through the literature. I long to have a direct contact with his work. My inclination to him was born in my wish to be like him, from the point of view of the imprint he left on humanity.
 “My own personal policy is one that goes with the motto that goes like: they will not talk about the man for the way that he dressed or the perfume that he used to put on, but the imprint he leaves on humankind. And his imprint has reached me too. I infected myself, like a Dalisian disease, from which I suffer, but maybe the desease is not the same as in other people”.

--Such a marked influence sometimes can affect your own work, or turn your admiration into total apathy in  a reproduction of codes, don’t you think?

“I admire the formal resolution in his work, because trying to get into someone’s subconcious world, it is a rather futile effort or you may get undefinable results, a freshness or you may be tresspassing boundaries...either if the person is a baker or an artist, even though a critic may not agree.

“ I always knew the difference between influence and copying.  Part of my work is done taking Dali as a reference, but  it is never an imitation.

--You are defensive against what, against who?

“ Against everything. If any time what you do is not in harmony with certain generally accepted interests, or certain points of view, then that is the time when your work is questioned. What they censor is what nobody expects from you at a certain time; it is not precisely what is done wrong or wrongly said, it happens in all spheres of life.
 “I believe in human perfection. I am ambitious, a dreamer, I want to be the best father in the world, the best husband, the best artist, the best man and the best friend, although the latter can be oniric, difficult to define”.

--Maybe, don’t you think you ask too much from yourself?

   “Yes, but those are the conditions to feel you are getting there, maybe you do not live that long, but if you do not urge yourself, Who would control your personal perfectioning, the cleanlinnes if your acts? I take good care of that, because I am interested in looking back and know I did not crash anybody,or hurt anybody or disciminated anybody. That is me”.

--In this book, there is a promotional attempt surpassing the contradictions between Cuba and the U.S. Do you have an opinion?

“ May God help this promotional effort with us and help build a bridge some day. May we live the “may we”, and may all the differences come to an end. And when that is achieved, may it serve as an example of human perfectioning”.

--What are the dreams you have been able to accomplish at this point and what are the ones you wish to accomplish yet?

“ The few and unfinished results I have achieved are coincidental with what I always wanted to be since I was a child: a painter. Well another dream I have is to hang one of my pieces at The Louvre, next to one of Dali’s and I fight so that  life may give me that as a present”.

But, How much are you willing  to leave behind to be the best artist, to be next to Dali?

“Everything is in balance, if I am just concerned about being the best artist, and leave the rest behind, I believe I will amount to nothing”.