"For the children that death took while playing, for the men that dimmed while working, for the poor that failed while loving, I will paint with the scream of a shotgun, with the power of thunder and the fury of battle."
Guaysamin
Before visiting the Guaysamin Museum I had never heard of this artist, uniformed as I am. I am so glad I met him.
I didn't of course. Meet him, that is. He's been dead for some time. But Guaysamun paints an uncompromising picture, lays his feelings bare and brutal and, as the above quote rather aptly demonstrates, matches his passion with eloquence. It feels very easy to get to know Guaysamin, to be moved by the causes which so anger and enthuse him. And generally, to leave wanting more, much more. I want a book about Guaysamin and I want world peace. And I can't understand why the existence of the firmer has not already brought about the latter.
Guaysamin is a painter with a purpose. Maybe every artist hopes to change the world. Maybe that is the sole purpose of art itself, when it comes down to it. But Guaysamin is the first I have encountered with quite such a strong, well spelled out mission. Guaysamin paints for the suffering of the world, for justice, for aid but above all, for peace.
The museum is split into two parts, one being his house and his own collections of artworks, gifts from other eminent artists he was friends with, all dedicated to his beloved homeland, Ecuador. The other is his own design, named the 'capillary del hombre' (the chapel of man), which displays his works and which is dedicated to the suffering of man.
"I would not have built this building," says an impassioned Guaysamin on video, a few years prior to his death, "if I thought all this was past, and there was no more injustice, no more prejudice, or violence, no more innocent suffering. This has to be here because still it continues." We must still fight for peace.
Months before I would have questioned that phrase, I would have asked whether it is possible to gain peace through fighting, whether even the terminology might undo the end goal. This trip, and Guaysamin himself, has shown me the complexities involved in peacemaking.
Guaysamin is angry. He painted in three main stages, and named them, 'the age of tears', 'the age of anger' and finally, 'the age of tenderness'.
The age of anger spans three decades. The paintings are spikey and feature eyes, tears of blood and desperate, clutching hands. They have backgrounds in black and grey, for death and loss. They inevitably feature the victims rather than the perpetrators, but there is no doubt about it, these paintings are angry.
And is there really any other reaction? Faced with the mutilation of children as a result of wars over land which is ravaged in the process of fighting over it, with the torture of families because they worshipped a different God, have a different skin tone, or follow a different political party, with the starvation of many because of the insatiable greed of a few - is there really any other reasonable reaction bar rage and misery at your own impotence to stop it, at the senselessness of it?
And can you broker peace without some anger? I don't mean open, fist flying anger, I mean a strong internal sense of the pointlessness, and am urgency to put it right. Are we perhaps sometimes too soft, too passive in our reaction, mistaking mutedness for peace?
Guaysamin encountered the sense of impotence which leads to this kind of anger at a young age. Whilst peacefully protesting for fair treatment of indigenous races in South America, someone (whether military or citizen) opened fire on the crowd, killing his friend in front of him.
Since then, and clearly, from before, Guaysamin had been much preoccupied with minorities in South America, and draws a lit from indigenous art influences in his style. In the 'age of anger', by far his largest body of work, he paints in response to real situations, both highlighting it and reflecting his own emotional response to it.
In a piece called 'Potosi', painted specifically to fit around the design of the chapel, Guaysamin depicts the miners of Potosi's silver mines in Bolivia, who were being treated abysmally, frequently dying in the mines and receiving very little pay at the time of painting, as emaciated figures drawn in white on pitch black, reaching towards the light but unable to touch it, wrapping the work around the circle of skylight at the top of the 'chapel'. He called it 'Potosi: In Search Of Sun and Liberty.'
But this is a man who is admirably well informed. His themes centre on world events, well outside of South America. He paints for Vietnam, Giron, Nicaragua, Lidice, as well as Chile and Argentina, covering the Vietnam war, fighting on the beach between American CIA anti communist forces and Cubans, starvation of babies due to mother's being too undernourished to feed them, the torture and massacre of the entire population of the small Czechoslovakian town of Lidice by Hitler, in reprisals for the assassination of a party member in Prague, which had the approval of the Czechoslovakian government, and the disappearances and torture of political dissidents by dictatorships in both Chile and Argentina.
I am particularly moved by a triptych dedicated to the suffering caused by the war in Vietnam, which was still raging when Guaysamin painted it. In the first part, a woman is shown with her hands above her head trying to protect herself. It represents fear. In the second she cries out, mouth open, hands either side of her head. It represents her anger at the danger to her and her children, who have no part in the political war that is killing them. In the final she looks up and holds up her hands above her. She is trying to catch the bombs, said Guaysamin. It represents hope.
The complexities that this kind of art examines, especially as Guaysamin was so eloquent in explaining his paintings, leaving nothing to chance in his brutal unveiling of the injustices in the world he lived in, strikes me and moves me deeply. That hope in this case is so utterly hopeless, speaks volumes. Does the woman benefit from her hope, I wonder? Does it make her daily existence in this war zone easier? Does it matter that her hope is misplaced, that she can never catch the bombs and prevent their devastation, given that in truth she is utterly helpless. There is nothing possible for her to do to practically prevent her suffering, so is it kinder for her to put her faith in something so useless, than to have no faith at all.
I don't think it's her frustration here, it's Guaysamin's. It's ours, as ordinary citizens, looking on and asking why.
Anger is necessary. And human.
Even so, Guaysamin's works still aim for peace above all else. Where anger might usually lead to blame, he circumvents this. Many of his most angry paintings are designed as several separate panels which can be not only switched around vin terms of order, but turned upside down. In one, depicting the oppression and fighting amongst different races, a white woman with blonde hair is either above or below a black man. Guaysamin fights for her, and what ever prejudice she might find herself the wrong sudecof, as much as he does the more obvious minorities. It is literally interchangeable, blame can go both ways, Guaysamin is not interested in blame. That's why he doesn't paint the perpetrators with such emphasis as he paints the sufferers. He is too angry fir simple vengeance. He is angry enough to go beyond that, to that most drastic of all potential reactions - a genuine request for peace. At any cost.
Interestingly, towards the end of his life, Guaysamin's focus changed in his paintings, and he entered the 'age of tenderness'. These paintings, abandoning the harsh black and grey for yellows and oranges, focus on a mother's love for her child. How and why this change came about seems less clear than with his eloquent explanations for the age of anger paintings, though there is, here and there, a window back to those issues so close to Guaysamin's heart, (a dying child, for example, unable to gain nutrients from his despairing and emaciated mother's teats), but there is a sense of love overpowering the anger or sense of injustice. It may be a hinagevti his own mum, or a reference to the indigineous concept of God known as Pachamama, or earth mother.
Or maybe it is a metaphor. After all, love, like peace, involves anger, protection, fierce intensity of emotion. Perhaps only with love, something stronger and more hot headed than charity or compassion, can be garner peace from chaos. And how many religions, novels or folk tales have used, as an example of the greatest, most brave and selfless love, that of a parent for their child?
"If we do not have the strength to shake everybody else's hands, if we do not have the tenderness to hold the children of the world in our arms, if we do not have the will to clean the earth if all its armies; thus small planet will become a parched black body in space."
Guaysamin
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