Eddy Ochoa Guzmán - Interview

WHEN THE SUN COMES OUT AT NIGHT

By Reinaldo Cedeño Pineda
Translation by Ellen Rosenzweig

The artist’s hand can change anything. A police officer and a paintbrush. The mysterious light of his nocturnal landscapes. ‘I wish I could get inside one of your paintings.’ The supreme beauty of water. A painter who writes songs.

A tiny piece of the Cuban countryside in the middle of the city: that’s Eddy Ochoa Guzmán’s home. In a corner stand a taro plant with its broad green leaves and a bonsai with its miniature fruit; a songbird trills its tribute to the sun. There are still a few cactus plants here and there, with their flowers and thorns, even though most of them have been removed, having overrun the place.

Eddy has concentrated the 50 years of his life on painting and music, with a child’s enthusiasm, stamina and joy. His landscapes have a soothing effect. The artist has learned to paint the river that runs through him, with the colors he sees outside of him.

I DELIGHTED IN NATURE

From the vantage point of Alto del Fuerte, in the mountains of Baracoa – where he was born on December 27, 1952 – the Yumurí River seemed immense. That spot, the site of what used to be a Spanish fortress, is full of legend and history.

“I always carry that setting in my mind. That river inspired both love and fear in me, and it’s the strongest memory I have. I delighted in nature.”

His father was a Rebel Army soldier in the Sierra Maestra mountains, and when the Revolution triumphed his family moved to Santiago de Cuba, the capital of what was then Oriente province. Eddy was only eight years old, and although he adapted well to that radical change in his life, the images of his birthplace never faded.

He was granted a scholarship to study in Havana, and then decided to apply for the San Alejandro Art Academy, but there was no space left. As a result, he went to the Fine Arts School in Pinar del Río, the country’s westernmost province.

This circumstance, which could have been frustrating, offered Ochoa the great opportunity of getting to know the land that grows the world’s best tobacco and has a variety of exceptional landscapes. Tobacco plantations, palms and orchids have found fertile ground in a topography known as the Viñales Valley, with its fascinating limestone hummocks.

His stay in Pinar was short, but its beauty was absorbed into his overall perspective.

“I learned a lot from maestro Domingo Ramos and his landscapes of the valley. Every day I watched his painting technique. When I went back to Santiago, Armando Rodríguez – an excellent painter with unorthodox opinions – helped me a lot. He told us to spend time at school, outside of class hours, painting landscapes, and I learned a few details from him.”

He continued learning on his own, as well as studying for two years at the José Joaquín Tejada Art School. But there were some who looked down their noses at landscape painting.

“In Santiago de Cuba, I clashed with modern art. They spurned me a bit, and I had a rough time, but I was lucky that painters such as Ferrer Cabello and Aguilera Vicente supported what I did."

“Once when I started doing landscapes, I commented that I had some trouble getting supplies, and Aguilera Vicente gave me a set of Chinese brushes. It was like being stuck in the middle of a river on a raft, and someone comes along and gets you over to the other side.”

COUNTERPOINT IN BLUE AND GREEN

His artistic path seemed to have come to an end when he joined the police department, specializing in criminology, but his vocation as a painter never faded. Of course, there were those who couldn’t comprehend how he could do both.

“Once I arrived at a meeting dressed in my police uniform, and some people who didn’t know me were surprised. So we conducted an informal survey among the visitors there, who were from Italy, France, the United States and Cuba, to determine if anybody had ever heard of a police officer who paints.”

And the outcome?

“Well, at least in that group, nobody knew of anyone. People couldn’t figure me out. I painted landscapes when I was on guard duty, and sometimes people would ask me to paint them something, which I did with pleasure. I had to travel to the municipalities for my work, and on those trips I absorbed all the images I saw."

“I went through a phase in which my landscapes were like women with long hair. That idea came to me as I was heading to the town of Dos Bocas, because there was a mountain that looked like a woman’s hair hanging loose, with a background of palm trees."

“Landscape artists have to look around a lot, to commit to memory all the elements that may help them later on. I usually used an ink pen in my office, because it was easier than setting up everything for oil painting. It really was quite odd to see a police officer painting.”

Thus he lived in a sort of counterpoint between blue and green, between the color of his uniform and his fondness for nature. And all his skills seemed to come together when he began doing police sketches, which can be so instrumental in capturing criminals.

“A police sketch is based on a graphic description of a person whom the witness has seen. It depends heavily on psychological techniques and the witness’ memory, as well as the witness’ age and the time of day when the event took place. When I started doing those drawings, there were no computers. It was done completely by hand, and I was asked to work on a number of complex cases.”

One involved a crime in which the key witness had not been able to see the perpetrator’s face clearly. But the artist’s talent and imagination played a fundamental role in achieving justice.

“It occurred to me to ask the witness if the perpetrator had any resemblance to someone he knew, and using that reference, a photo and other elements, I drew the face. Later on I learned that the criminal had been arrested. I drew everything by hand. A computer is a very sophisticated tool, but you have to draw a portrait by hand, because the person may have a particular mark or difficult features that are hard to capture, or the portrait may come out looking stilted."

“I still believe there are certain features, certain shadows that can be achieved more accurately without a computer, and they are precisely the features that set one person apart from another.”

COUNTERPOINT IN GREEN AND BLACK

After participating in over 20 group shows since 1975, Ochoa’s first one-man show, entitled Two Facets of Landscape, was held in 1989 at the Elvira Cape Public Library on Heredia Street, the heart of Santiago de Cuba’s culture.

Ochoa’s son, also named Eddy, is majoring in art history. His considered opinion of his father as an artist is that he is very honest and jubilant in his defense of landscape painting, as well as in his defense of beauty and the need to preserve nature.

“I look at the landscape from an ecological point of view,” the artist himself explained. “There are no humans in my paintings. Sometimes I paint a road where people have been, because in their zest to live and develop, people change the environment, usually for the worse. There will always be landscape paintings, because people long to be at one with nature."

“You have to know how to look at places. Nowadays it’s easier to take photos than to go out to the countryside with an easel. Photos are my sketches, the bases for my landscapes. Many of my paintings have bodies of water, because water has a matchless beauty and is the source of life."

“I painted a setting near the San Juan River, a stream that people walk by and never see. I started to bring it back to life by recreating the landscape’s natural environment, as it must have looked a long time ago. People have asked me if it’s a landscape of the Sierra Maestra, but in fact the water flowing into the San Juan is sewage. The artist’s hand can change everything.”

There is a frenzy of green in your paintings, a luxuriance...

“Yes, I create foliage, I bring it to life. I want it to look as real as possible. I prefer luxuriance to detail. I love to paint very thick foliage – I take great pleasure in greens."

“A painter from New York named Peter Coe used to say that he lived in a steel and concrete city where people longed for the country. They only see trees in photos, or ‘imprisoned trees’ in parks, caged like birds."

“Some people who play classical music think that it’s the only really civilized music. The same can be said of ballet; some consider folk dancing uncultured. But people always love nature and the human figure. I paint for art connoisseurs and for those who visit galleries for the first time. Someone once told me, ‘I wish I could get inside one of your paintings."

“Art should fill people with beauty and the freshness of the landscape; in the midst of this violent world we live in, landscapes are a touch of harmony and joy. Painting landscapes isn’t easy.”

But in addition to all the luxuriance, you have come up with something unique: nocturnal landscapes. Why do you paint them?

“Almost everyone does daytime paintings, but once when I was hospitalized, I looked through the window and saw a lighthouse that illuminated a spot in the landscape. I said to myself, ‘It’s amazing how man can artificially light up part of the unseen landscape."

“When I illuminate a landscape, there’s no doubt that it continues to exist, even if it cannot be seen. It’s a psychological message.”

And what is the attraction of nocturnal landscapes?

“The charm of it lies in achieving the force of light within the darkness of the landscape.”

And can there be light within that darkness?

“I search for that light, I artificially place that light in a spot, it comes from a mystical place. It’s a different approach; maybe that’s why I’ve attracted attention in the world of landscape painting. I’ve never liked being like everyone else. Landscapes have been painted in a thousand ways, but this is a new way of looking at them.”

Some people say it’s almost impossible to paint a landscape in Cuba without feeling the influence of Tomás Sánchez, a Cuban landscape artist who’s known around the world. To what extent do you agree with this?

“They also say that when you think about painting something, Tomás Sánchez has already done it. Those are the reverential opinions of critics, due to the magnitude of Tomás Sánchez’s work. I think his art is magnificent. I note a certain quality in his work, a bit of primitive, if you will. He achieves elements that never attained by an academic painter and puts in details that one could never see at the distance he chooses, and that’s very interesting to me. I feel his influence, but I do what I feel inside.”

A FLOWER FEAST

Eddy Ochoa is a respectful gentleman, but when challenged he jumps into the fray. He does not demand that the world praise him, but he knows how to move people through his paintings.
The Dominican Republic, a Caribbean neighbor, has opened its galleries to him. Shows like Infinite Presence and Midnight Dreams were highly praised by critics and public alike, and his creativity doesn’t end there.

When he’s painting, a tune often comes into his head, so he puts down his brush and sings the melody into a tape recorder. Music also comes to him in the middle of the night, as his wife María Aurora can attest: she has been startled more than once when he jumps out of bed to appease his musical whims. By the way, María Aurora has inspired several of his painted waterfalls.

Ochoa also heads the Primavera Project, a musical training program for kids, and some of his songs have been selected for the annual Singing to the Sun Festival, Cuba’s most important musical event for children. He even participated in a Cuban television program marking the end of the millennium, in which a huge children’s chorus sang: “How beautiful Santiago looks! It looks like a seesaw!... How beautiful it is!”

His granddaughter Daniela is a sight to see, as she and her friends dance to Grandpa’s songs.

How are children’s songs and painting related?

“I love beauty, things that are brand new, and the children’s way of thinking, which is as pure as the landscape, not polluted.”

A Party of Flowers, by Eddy Ochoa

Dear little friend, I invite you
to the party of flowers,
where colors
will be shared,
but it happens in our dreams
so we must go to sleep....

If you had to choose right now between painting and music, which would you choose?
“I’m a painter, a painter who writes songs.”