Alfredo Cecilio Rodríguez Cedeño - Interview

An Infinite Green

By Reinaldo Cedeño Pineda
Translation by Ellen Rosenzweig

I prefer the smell of oil paints and wet soil to the fragrance of perfume. Paintings were my girlfriends. I like old trees: they talk to you. When I look someone in the eye, I discover who they are. An artist is never alone. A painter of late afternoons. I ask God to put me at the top among landscapers.

Alfredo is a boy in a man’s body. He still has a child-like capacity to be surprised, and his tenderness, spontaneity and a special inner light remain intact, shining in his eyes. He may have learned, as José Martí wrote, that “one can only be happy if he has maintained the soul of a child.” This did not come about by chance, but rather through a fortuitous combination of circumstances.

“My father had a farm, and he had planted a lot of sugarcane, over there in Reparto Siboney, on the outskirts of the city of Bayamo. I was born into that environment on October 25, 1969, and I lived there the first 10 years of my life, in close contact with nature, a great pleasure for me. I’ve always been curious about why I came to paint landscapes, and now I’m sure that’s the reason.

“From the moment we woke up in the morning, I was involved with nature: mango trees, coconut palms, horses, goats… I have seven siblings, and I’m one of the youngest. My brothers liked to fish, so we’d go down to the river. I also met a lot of wonderful people whom I’ll remember for the rest of my life.”

His grandfather was a sergeant in the 19th-century wars of independence against Spain, and his distinguished, honorable father, Antonio Dominador Rodríguez Martínez, with his great hooked nose and straight hair, must have been very proud of him.

“When I did something my father didn’t like, he’d punish me. ‘Come on, get down on your knees and don’t get up until I say so!’ He wouldn’t permit anyone to smoke or drink around him, and you had to address him as ‘Sir,’ right away when you talked to him. He taught us discipline, and that kept us from becoming wild, aimless kids.”

Alfredo recalls an incident, like a rose blooming in his memory. “My father sat me on his knee and I was playing with a stick. I sketched a little house in the dirt, with flowers and everything, and my father applauded. That may have been the first time I was praised in that way.”

His mother and father contributed equally to his upbringing. Together, they provided him with a variety of influences: his father’s Hispanic heritage, his mother’s African and Cuban roots, and a wide range of personality traits and traditions.

Alfredo moved to the city of Bayamo with his mother. He speaks of her with reverence. Although he has done many portraits of her, he doesn’t feel that he has been able to capture her completely.

“Ah, Francisca Cedeño Zamora is the most beautiful person in the world. I never get tired of smothering her with affection. She was born deep in the countryside and had so many responsibilities as a child. The girls had to do the housework, maintain the few pieces of furniture they had, do the cleaning. And they also had to milk the cows, go to the river and wash clothes, feed the farm animals. She’s a tough, strong-willed woman, even now when she’s almost 70.”

DISCOVERY

Martial arts movies – particularly those starring Bruce Lee – and Westerns captured the young man’s imagination. Sometimes he would copy something out of a magazine or from a movie. Indeed, his first “primitive” artwork wasn’t of palm trees, but of a kung fu master.

“When I was 14, I cut up a shirt with a pair of scissors. I spread the back of the shirt over a board and painted a karate or kung fu scene, with little Chinese houses. I used some watercolors and some oil paints. Later on, I designed a pack of Spanish playing cards.”

When the cards were dealt out, some of his friends lifted their heads in surprise: “You MADE these?” And that was the start of an irrepressible passion.

At 16, he dreamed of being a baseball player and, if he was lucky, of taking part in one of those memorable encounters between the Cuban and U.S. teams, the two greatest in that game of balls and strikes. But fate had another future in store for him.

“One day I went to Bayamo’s Central Park and saw some artists painting. When I approached them, I felt excited and a little scared. I loved the smell of the paint. The next day, I said to a man I knew, ‘Take me to the art school.’ And he answered, ‘Okay, but you’ll have to get up early.’

“When we got to the school, that smell of the oil paint thrilled me all over again. I prefer the smell of oil paints and wet soil to the fragrance of perfume.”

The school was named after Manuel del Socorro Rodríguez, a multifaceted artist whose work adorns the altars of Bayamo’s Greater Parish Church. All of a sudden, Alfredo’s dreams seemed to be turning into reality. But he had so much to learn, and we all know that art instruction begins at an early age.
Nevertheless, Alfredo was not intimidated. He did a charcoal drawing of Titian’s Danaë and received a lot of advice and training. His talent and persistence eventually convinced many teachers that this young man deserved a chance, even though he was not officially registered at the academy.

“I went to the art school every morning. At noon I would go to the library and all afternoon I would study books of famous paintings. In the evening I went to the community cultural center. That was my life from age 16 to 20. I didn’t have a lot of girlfriends, because I kept them sort of apart from my life: paintings were my girlfriends. I discovered that painting was the passion of my life, and I’m sure it will always be that way.”

IN THE SHADOW OF THE GREAT MASTERS

“I feel like my real education was through the great masters. When I opened the books I saw the works of Rembrandt, Velázquez, Gustave Courbet, the 18th-century Dutch landscape painters. I said to myself, ‘This is real painting: Goya, Rubens…’ but I was just an amateur. I had no method, no training, no real teacher.

“I envy those painters from long ago who could stand before enormous canvasses, at a time when there was no photography or technological development, and achieve magnificent things. I envy Michelangelo for having painted the Sistine Chapel.

“When I find the right painting supplies I get to work, always with the great masters as my reference. I’m inspired by the Barbizon landscape artists, the painters living outside of Paris. I also study 19th-century Cuban landscape painters like romantic Esteban Chartrand and Valentín Sanz Carta, who was more of a realist. And I think that I’m somewhere in between them, in terms of colors and feeling. As my work more closely approaches my own period, I’m very concerned about the effect of the brushstrokes, more than achieving a highly polished painting.

“I started to study the Renaissance up to the present, following my own instincts. I painted everything I could. I was a bookworm; they had to shoo me out of the library at closing time. I was hungry for knowledge. My first idols were the Dutch landscape painters. What atmosphere, what light, what color!
“I especially liked to use emerald greens and lemon yellow, in order to achieve different tonalities, but I was in love with ochres and siennas, browns in general, and I still am.”

And do you think those colors accurately identify the Caribbean and Cuban natural world?

“Yes. Titian said to ‘dirty up’ colors, but what he really meant was to ‘gray up’ colors. The colors of oil paints, as they come out of the tube, do not exist in nature, not with such total purity. When they are used unmixed, it’s to create a specific effect.
“Blue or orange can do many things, but the sky is more than that: it has ochre and a lot of other things. If you mix Prussian blue with white, or cobalt blue with white, you’re not going to achieve that tone. Because the sky has an incredible number of nuances, more than anyone can imagine or than can be seen with the naked eye.”

Aren’t you worried that the viewer will sense a coldness in your work, instead of the warmth of the tropics?

“Look, I’m very strong on certain colors and a certain kind of light. I don’t paint many landscapes at noon, but rather at 10 in the morning. What I like best is to paint in the late afternoon, around 4 or 5 p.m., because there’s an element of magic at that time.

“When the sun starts going down, but hasn’t gone down completely, the clouds are still red but begin to take on a little ochre. At that moment there is such a wide a range of shades, so rich and picturesque that it’s incredible. The trees change from the bright green of midday and there is an array of nuances more suited to my spirit. I’m a quiet man; I like tranquility, solitude, meditation. I like to sit in a corner with a book, reading and painting. I like to hide from the world; I don’t like hustle and bustle.”

You have referred to solitude several times. Do you think it’s necessary for creating? Aren’t you afraid, as poet Dulce María Loynaz put it, that life will punish you, filling you up with solitude?

“I have to be myself. You have to dig deep in order to paint and bear witness to that powerful force every human being carries inside, and that can only be done in solitude. When you’re alone you constantly discover and rediscover yourself.

“I’m married but I don’t have kids. My paintings are my children, and they’ve given me headaches sometimes, but it’s been great. An artist, a human being can be afraid, but he is never really alone.”

When we look at your paintings, we imagine you in the countryside, making notes, with your eyes filled with light…

“Well, I often go into the countryside, and I do make a lot of sketches, of trees and of those simple huts, called bohíos, so common in the countryside, and just like Cuba’s native peoples used to live in.

“There’s no canon for painting bohíos. If you paint a bohío in a professional manner, some will say it’s not realistic, but if you go to the countryside you’ll find bohíos of all kinds: made of palm thatching, of palm tree planks, of adobe, of raw clay, and of woven grasses. There is a huge variety, but at my first personal show some critics said that I had painted bohíos and oxcarts the way they used to be. So I told them, ‘No, if you go to the countryside, you’ll see oxcarts and bohíos of all kinds.”

THE ROOTS OF MY SOUL

This artist still considers nature a gift and a privilege. He had his first one-man show at age 18 and he has won several national prizes in the category of landscapes, in the eastern city of Las Tunas.

Alfredo Cecilio Rodríguez Cedeño is a creator of landscapes; they are in his blood. But he doesn’t believe in stereotypes or symbols. And it’s clear that he’s moving in the direction of large formats.

His modest, as yet unfinished home is filled with books on painting, canvasses and recently used paintbrushes. He is a simple man who looks toward the future. He walks the narrow streets of his city with a strange restlessness. And when it’s time to paint, “I take refuge in the countryside.”

During a 19th-century uprising against colonial power, the residents of San Salvador de Bayamo, founded in 1513, preferred to burn their township down to the ground rather than surrender it to the Spanish crown. It was also the place where the strains of “La Bayamesa” – now the national anthem – were played for the first time, on October 20, 1868. The lyrics, written by Perucho Figueredo, summed up the Cubans’ nationalist spirit: “Do not fear a glorious death/ because when one dies for his country, he lives on.”

“I’m proud of my city and my country, but in art nothing is sacred. It’s important to criticize and discuss everything that’s painted and seen. That’s why I don’t hesitate to take things off or add things to my paintings. An artist may put in a palm tree to please the public, and say, ‘This is a Cuban painting because it has a palm tree.’ But I might paint a landscape without a palm tree and it would still be Cuban.

“Landscapes are universal. And I would continue painting landscapes no matter where I lived: in Mexico or in Greenland. A landscape is a landscape. I’m not the type of painter who gets hung up on certain things like royal poincianas or ceibas.

“I’m more interested in old trees, the ones that talk to you and tell you they’re 70 or 80 years old; or those that are covered with reeds and say, ‘I am nature, which has withstood everything.’ I like the old trees better than the young ones. I think it’s my philosophy of life.”

On the other hand, by linking yourself so closely with landscapes, aren’t you limiting your access to other fields? Or do you have some kind of bias against other themes or forms?

“I’m a young artist and, aside from landscape painting, I want to do everything, although in my own way. I’ve got a lot of things stored up in my head, but I’m still faithful to landscapes. I’ve done seascapes, but I’m really a man of the land.

“I like the campesino, with a hoe in his hand. I always include a human figure in the landscape. There are places in the countryside that are completely flat, with no mountains, filled with trees and houses: it’s that human kind of landscape I like. I also paint animals, because without them landscapes and life in general would not be complete.

“Even though I don’t have a degree, I keep painting constantly. My thirst for painting has never been satiated. I’ve studied the human figure and the atmospheres that can be created. I came to my own conclusions, found my own atmosphere, and I continue to build my personal library.

“Jean François Millet painted farm laborers as if they were part of the land. He was so identified with the land that he really had roots. That’s the way I like to paint, all the way back to the roots, the roots of my soul.

PRAYERS TO GOD

Instead of boasting about what he has accomplished, Alfredo insists on talking about what he still needs to do. He is a man of conviction, and he also appeals to the heavens.

“I’ve got a lot more goals to reach. You’re speaking with a man who hasn’t traveled even half of the road ahead, a man with any aching to do things, to paint. With God willing, one day you’ll interview me and I’ll be able to say that I’ve achieved many things, many of the dreams I have inside.”

How far do you want to go?

“As a landscape painter, I hope to reach to top, not just in Cuba, but throughout the world.”

Isn’t that awfully ambitious?

“It might sound ambitious or pedantic, but it’s my dream. In my prayers, I ask God to take me to the top among landscape painters. If that’s immodest, may God forgive me. I also include my fellow artist Jorge Rodríguez in my prayers, because to my mind he’s an excellent landscape painter.”

Do you have a habitual way of looking at your subject?

“The eyes say it all, they tell you a lot about people. I’ve even painted my own eyes. Eyes have a vital force that isn’t found in either the hands or the voice. When I look people in the eyes, I can see who they are. That’s why I stress that part a lot. [The late Ecuadoran painter and sculptor] Guayasamín used to say that even if a person gets fat or thin, the nose, eyes and mouth stay the same. I agree with that.”

Don’t you honestly feel that everything has been said and done in regard to landscape painting – that green can only go so far, that many pictorial trends have emerged precisely as a reaction to this creative exhaustion?

“One critic told me he had a ‘phobia’ of landscapes. This genre has always had its ups and downs, and it will continue to have them, just like portraits. But that critic was referring to ‘palm trees and pretty little things,’ purely ornamental. I paint landscapes that I enjoy. I may paint with ocher, sienna, green tones – and if you criticize me, that’s your opinion. That’s what I feel and what I do.

“The geography of the world and interior is constantly changing. Green is infinite.”