Raúl Toro Master
ARTIST REVIEW
DRAWING AND PAINTING IN MY CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
My beginnings in childhood were with totally empirical drawings. In my neighborhood there were no teachers or academies or schools related to art, and my first drawings were with colored pencils based on different illustrations of school books with few color images of the different subjects of primary school.
Already at the beginning of high school, my knowledge advanced a little to the extent that I began my friendship with some classmates who had the same hobby and by a proposal from the teacher: to start copying the images that the book brought and that the English teacher proposed to me in exchange for monthly grades in favor.
Then, expanded my few and empirical knowledge, the next thing was to copy the illustrations of all or almost all the books of the different subjects of the years of studies through which I was advancing in exchange for good grades that gave me the opportunity to continue in the baccalaureate to be able to complete it by changing notes for the extension of drawings almost always, Despite the many criticisms of the classmates of all the different school years and the cambalache of "good" drawings and "paintings" of the different subjects until grade 11 as it is called today.
After finishing my baccalaureate, my studies of drawing and painting at the Institute of Fine Arts of Medellín and at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Antioquia, expanded my knowledge in a better cemented way and contact with art schools, galleries, museums and artists in general led my life definitively through the world of art.
MY BEGINNINGS IN THE LANDSCAPE
In the company of some friends from academia, contact with nature, contact with the landscape is achieved; To enter, to look, observe and study the different geographies and the surroundings: a stream, a tree, a mountain, a construction, a sunrise, a noon, a sunset, a human being, all our environment and the study of each of our pictorial elements and their composition. Look and draw, try to paint nature, and the beautiful landscape that surrounds us. In a word, the beauty of our surroundings.
MY BEGINNINGS IN THE HUMAN FIGURE
In the company of a small group of friends and armed with a small support, what was given was to approach the human figure from various scenarios including parks, popular markets, bars and street situations, asylums of the third and fourth age. The human body from countless angles trying to capture the soul of so many beings in their different trades that occur as life goes by, of infinity of movements. It sought to try to capture the anguish from the daily need for subsistence, based on the rules of the academy and the free forms of expressionism both in drawing and color.
MY WORK DEVELOPED IN ENGRAVING
As in the beginnings of the human figure, there was the learning of the different aspects of the technique and from different tasks of the day life as well as the bohemian life of the night. I have approached all these topics as somber themes of daily nocturnal experiences of the city. Almost all this work was done based on the technique of linoleum to present me with better and more varied results.
MY THEMES FROM ECOLOGY
It emerged as research from the air pollution that we inhale second after second, the different ethereal waste and gases expelled by the chimneys of industries and factories. Water pollution by industrial and household liquid and solid waste. The noise in the same way produced by factories, car engines and the airplane. As a result, lung and various diseases in the human body. Rough and heavy work in the different workshops of the different metallurgical industries.
MY LANDSCAPE AS A PROPOSAL
My landscape as a proposal already at a professional level based no longer on the beauty of the stream or the mountain but rather on the territorial change of the latifundio of which at first the land was sustained in general, in the process of gradual change that has been taking place to the extent that the land is divided due to the various inheritances from parents to children or the partition of the land by the different sales.
In the case of my current landscape, the drawing and color selected with an expressionist style fragmented both in oil and acrylic and / or other coloristic techniques based on green and red as colors faced because of so many problems of a social nature that each and every one of the different Latin American countries and especially in ours.
WAREHOUSE ITEMS AND OBJECTS
Venturing a little into another theme, the theme of cellar or still life, as they say. In my work, the desire to draw and paint trajinados and unusual homemade objects to do a little different work with respect to what was seen until that moment. Objects such as the basket, the sack, the round panela encapachada, the cob, the olla imusa, the corn, the coffee, the beans and the avocado began to have their own stamp; The salt of guaca, the clay pot, the axe and the machete made their appearance in my work. It was the desire to venture a little into costumbrismo with a different vision. Worked or painted almost always within the family of pastels based on gum arabic or beeswax and on surfaces of branded paper and cardboard.
ICONOGRAPHY AND SYMBOLOGY IN THE CITY
Starting from elements of a population to the very general objects that have been part of the different human situations related to security, with securities at all levels: on a personal level, on a spiritual level, at the city level. The different types of fears, the fear of the unknown, the fear of the dark, the fear of different types of animals including man as the main actor, the fear of many known and unknown insects including equally different religious icons as well as natural or vegetable and/or metallic ones.
From this interpretative framework of my work appears the color by means of irregular spots in the middle of these objects, the oblivion by means of different forms of colors next to others of different colors showing with irregularity the passage of time on objects such as plates, knockers, locks and walls in high degree of "decomposition" due to rust and the different stains due to oblivion and the passage of time in objects. Security-related city dwellers.
In the same or similar way, the door appears in my work and with it the different styles. In addition to the history of that element in our lives in which our privacy and the symbolism of it are included, because beyond the form and its beauty or the deformity by the same passage of time is the blurring to address unexpected forms within a creative and reinterpretative style in the different spaces where the inside and the outside can be differentiated; the open, the half-open and the closed; the front and the back; The door participating in the personal and the alien, of the own and the private. And as an essential part of that door appears in my work the ties: elements such as padlocks and especially chains enter the scene because they tie, because they condition and because they become part of the different types of societies and link us to society and the family, to education and development as responsible people from birth until our disappearance and even after it.
In our homes, offices, companies, temples, the different popular, religious and home icons based on tile and mosaic in addition to certain aspects of the same graffiti, sometimes well, sometimes neglected and misplaced, which break into urban aspects of my work.
AWARDS AND TRIBUTES
In the field of ecology and in the development of my project, I painted in those days a series of large-format works of which I sent two to Bogotá on the occasion of an invitation from the Museum of Contemporary Art to participate in the Second National Salon of this museum and in which my work was initially selected. I was then awarded the third prize of the salon in 1981 among 800 works sent from all over the country. The teacher Germán Páez Morales director said that my work was the first prize, but my resume was lost in the shipment.
In 2004 I was awarded the first prize in the Tenth Departmental Hall of the Cortiple Organization of the municipality of Envigado and in which in the First Hall the work of the teacher Débora Arango was awarded.
From that room I have made several tributes among which the tribute granted by the Congress of the Republic stands out. Tribute presented in the premises of the Assembly of Antioquia on November 9, 2016.
In November 2018 I was awarded the San Lorenzo de Ana prize by the Cultural Board of the El Poblado neighborhood, in the city of Medellín and given to 20 outstanding people in the different areas of culture.
This year highlights the tribute of the gallery El Laberinto of the city of Medellín and the invitation to the exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art of Bucaramanga on the occasion of the Thirtieth Anniversary of its foundation.
TEACHING
After almost 12 years of profession, when I had a broader concept of techniques and themes and having the methodology and pedagogy courses corresponding to the different pictorial techniques, I dedicated 3 days a week to teaching for all audiences, all ages from 3 years. I have already completed 38 years in teaching, an activity that, like the development of my work, I am also always passionate about in companies in the city, high schools and in my own workshop. 30 years in Medellín and 8 years in Envigado, where I live and where I currently have my workshop.
