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‘Sleep’ by Carlos Madrid

Added 2022-04-22 14:01:04 +0000 UTC

This weeks’s Spotlight on Art features Sleep by FAA Graduate Carlos Madrid.

We are delighted to share with you a new Spotlight on Art showcasing Sleep, a still life painting by Carlos Madrid. Carlos is a Peruvian born artist and is a graduate of The Florence Academy of Art as well as a former instructor at the academy from 2006-2008.

We hope you truly enjoy reading about some of the process behind this musically and emotionally influenced painting as well as much about the artist behind it! Through Madrid’s own words we are gifted insight into the symbolic world behind such a uniquely beautiful work by the hand of an artist who has made many.

This work titled Sleep was inspired by the British composer Max Richter’s music, specifically by his record Sleep. This is a very haunting and meditative piece of music which lasts 8 hours. This piece was what kept me company during the time that it took to finish the painting, about three months. It produced in me a very strong sense of peace and quiet.

Also, the fact that we were in a lockdown because of the pandemic, I spent a lot of time alone in my studio. This helped to create the right mood in the very quiet environment of my studio and I feel that it allowed me to transmit this energy into the painting I was working on.

In the last couple of years, I have been exploring and creating works with a very limited monochromatic palette mostly in greys with small touches of color for balance, rose petals and pearls have become two icons that I seem to use over and over again, why? I have no clear explanation. I just seem to have the need to incorporate them into my work, it is almost an emotional desire to do it. And also, it has become almost like a signature of my recent works

Also, in general my work has been very influenced by many years of Meditation and Yoga practice which has led me to create images that convey silence, balance and simplicity.

I seek for the essential in each composition so that when presented to the viewer it will hopefully transmit the clarity of my intentions in communicating my ideas.

I never do studies or small posters. Quite often I see an image in my mind and put it down in very small pieces of paper just for the composition idea, then I look for the objects that are going to allow me to create what I have seen in my mind. I proceed to draw directly on the canvas or panel.

I have tried many times to do studies, but with no success. I do spend quite a lot of time finding the colors that I am going to use in a project and mix the lines of the different colors so that I have them ready to begin the work. Usually, I prepare enough color to last me for at least a week.

In this particular project my intention was to create a work with a very restricted monochromatic palette to see if I could come up with an image that was both beautiful, powerful and at the same time elegant. I hope that I succeeded.

More about Carlos Madrid:

I was born in the Andes Mountains of Peru in 1950. I spent a vibrant early childhood in a magical landscape, exposed to the rhythms and colors of daily rural life, and later moved with my family to Lima. An extremely religious grandmother influenced my parents to register me in a Catholic School run by the Mercedary order of priests. The years at that school and the mandatory church services submerged me in an environment filled with religious art. My early exposure to Catholic, Andean and Incan traditions was an enormous influence on my developing artistic imagination.

At the age of eighteen in 1968, I left Peru for Israel eager to see other cultures. Israel and Jerusalem were for me a first encounter with the larger world. I found the ancient Holy City and its surrounding landscape, like the Andes Mountains of my childhood, filled with magic, history, religion and mysticism. I came to cherish the silence and beauty I experienced in the desert, temple, church and ancient ruin. These experiences continued to enrich me and reinforced my deep desire to become an artist. In 1973, the Yom Kippur War drove me to look for a new home and I accepted a scholarship at Parsons School of Design in 1974. Although I moved to America and settled in Manhattan, I have traveled widely in North and South America, Europe and India, fulfilling my early childhood dream of seeing the world and its different cultures, all together I have lived and worked in ten different countries.

Since 1980, I have dedicated myself completely to mastering the drawing and painting techniques of the past, including the egg tempera-oil mixed technique which I learned from the painter Ernst Fuchs in Austria. During the late 90's I began my training with various teachers including Jacob Collins, Michael Aviano and also at The Florence Academy of Art in Florence, Italy. Eventually I contacted the great Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum, and in the year 2000, I was invited to come to Norway to work at his side, and worked under his guidance until 2003. Since then, I have been showing every year in Norway, Italy, England and/or the USA.

My guides are the great Masters of the past and I am totally committed to the achievement of excellence in my craft and to the tradition of story-telling through images.

I am also deeply indebted to my Late Wife Elizabeth Roberts and to my Yoga Master, Shri Yogiraj Swami Bua-ji, for all that he taught me in the great tradition of Yoga and meditation. He left his physical body in 2010 at the ripe age of 110, and his ashes were dispersed in the Yamuna River. Swami Bua-ji's teachings continues to influence and sustain my work in innumerable ways. My gratitude towards him is boundless.