Abstract Art Paintings - Jaime Alfonso

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I started painting at the age of 13, was drawing earlier under the influence of books on Durer and Rembrandt which my father possessed. I spent about seven years attending the free academy of my master, Miguel Venegas Cifuentes, whose outlook, as an architect and Director of the Fine Arts Academy of the Catholic University in Santiago, Chile, was strongly classic and academic; but his own versatility was prodigious.
I had my first one-man show in 1958, in Santiago, at a time when I was studying for a career in law. Then, as a practicing attorney I had scarce time for art; during these ten years I painted no more than ten pictures per year, in a rapid impressionist-expressionist technique ("Streets", "Market", "Mountains"). I began to look for a technique, system, method to fit the short time at my disposal. At the same time I was teaching a few hours of Art to the last grades in the Jesuit High School in Chillan, Chile; as teaching leads to learning, I began exploring different ages and schools of painting to stimulate the students with a sense of freedom.

In the course of my first trip to the US in 1964, I was strongly impressed by the Van Gogh retrospective at the Guggenheim and some Gauguin paintings at the Phillips. I started experimenting in "musical" and "linear" styles, and began painting "series" ("Rocks, Cobquecura", "The Lake", "Trees"). In 1968 I exhibited and sold my first paintings in "vertical" style, and painted my first totally abstract compositions, a series titled "Little Red Riding Hood".
In 1971 I left Chile and the profession of Law to become a painter in Australia. During my Australian years, my main care was to learn to "finish" the large paintings in acrylics, mainly landscapes with birds, demanding local detail and the strong light of Australia ("River", "City", "Egret" series). However, at the time I began to use the material leftovers in strongly expressionist and abstract compositions with thick texture and collage, in some of which the addition of the special source of light was necessary ("Cockfight"). The guiding idea was to produce an object with some of the third-dimensional character of a square sculpture or a huge jewel. After a visit to the Grand Canyon in 1978, I initiated a series of semiabstract seascapes and landscapes in which the predominant preoccupation was light through values of a given color in a simple composition of united subject, based on use of rough surfaces with strong impasto contrasting with plain areas. ("Sealight", "Canyon", "Rock" series). At the time I was under contract to produce numbers of Australian landscapes, still-lifes and interiors for different galleries and chains all over the country; I used to work simultaneously on ten or more pictures, with different subjects and styles and even media, as is said Picasso did, and I still do. I learned that the opposition and similarities in several paintings, coexisting, sometimes fertilize each other and stimulate creativity.
On my arrival in the US in 1980, I decided to maintain and deepen the variations and explorations started and affirmed in the last years of freedom in Australia. I have been painting mainly in three currents: realist/impressionist/postimpressionist, surrealist and abstract/expressionist, which I consider the most interesting and fertile of our time (or the most apt to express my interests and creative urge). I don't see a real contradiction between them, or any necessity of consistency to fill those mere labels. It would be a loss of time trying to find a unique synthesis. That meaning would appear by itself, or never appear. Only the future will say if we did it in a positive sense and in the right place.
By now, I have been painting for more than sixty years. I have tried almost every technique, every subject. I have sold thousands of paintings. Following the path of my master Miguel, I have been teaching for many years. Traveling, I have painted in many streets and byways, in almost every corner of the world. I exhibited my work every year, and continue to do so in galleries of New England; the Internet I hope will let me show my work to new eyes, in a sort of wider perspective or ideal retrospective. Like Miguel, my master, I believe the pleasure of painting is in the painting, not in the selling. I quote from his last (untranslatable) letter: "El pén dulo ha vuelto. Del borron ininteligible a la tontera frivola...De lo informe a lo geométrico - de lo abstracto a lo super-realista... y el mundo sigue. Y tú y yo, como monjes del medioevo, callados, lejanos, solitarios, mirando, observando y guardando celosos el patrimonio de lo eterno" (1975)
A synthesis of the art of our day and time, that is perhaps what we wanted to be, or to do with so many essays, attempts, experiments and experience of what looks like chaos, indecipherable. "Only time -the master concluded- discovers the truth. This French saying gives me a perspective of what I am and want to pursue in my journey through time". We do not paint to explain in writing, but to see the work done.