I was born on April 16, 1951 in La Habana, Cuba. My father owned a garment factory. At the age of five I was enrolled in a private military school in La Habana, which I attended until the age of nine when I emigrated with my family to the United States. Of my Cuban childhood most of my memories center around school and the beach where we spent weekends and summers in a house my father designed himself.
Upon reaching the United States in 1960 with my mother and brother (my father came shortly afterwards), I adapted quickly and as best I could. I remember being fluent in English within nine months and that I enjoyed a new sense of freedom and chaos in American public schools that was in sharp contrast to the discipline and strict control of my military school.
I was fascinated by the new and different American lifestyle and I became quite a fan of the "American Way of Life." In the fall of 1961 we moved to Philadelphia for my parents to find work in the garment industry. Away from contact with other Cubans I quickly became Americanized. In 1965, before I finished tenth grade, we relocated to Miami for my father to go into business with his brother. In Miami I lived at home until I went to college and although I visited home during vacations I considered my real home Gainesville, where I met and then married my wife.
My artistic education began in Cuba where I would from time to time participate in art class. We would be told to draw and I can remember using colored papers to fold, cut and paste. My drawings were usually of landscapes and houses. I would draw hills with palm trees and thatched huts as I'd seen in the countryside, and brick houses with gables, chimneys and fences as I'd seen in my "Dick and Jane" English books.
After coming to America I remember infrequent art classes in junior high where I carved soap, drew "cubistic" pictures and learned the colors of the rainbow. In ninth grade we drew pictures out of our own imaginations. Other than that the extent of my artistic activities as an adolescent comprised of building ship models and painting an occasional picture in water colors (I once painted a space capsule bobbing in the ocean). I also made marine signal flags from cut and pasted construction paper that I copied from the dictionary and put up on the walls in my room. But It was not until I was on my own at college that I began to persistently investigate art.
At first I took up architecture in college, this being the only professional creative outlet acceptable to my family-- To be a poet or an artist was ridiculous-- quite an idiotic thing to entertain. One had to be born at least with paint brushes in his hands, which I, to my father's certain knowledge had not been.
As soon as I took my first freshman courses in Architecture I became disillusioned. I realized that architecture would involve a great deal more technical engineering and mathematical factual learning than I cared to submit to. My mind, I could see, was of a more philosophical, questoning bent; I was less interested in finite, determinisic disciplines than in new ideas and in finding deeper, more personally understood truths than science or logical reasoning seemed to offer.
I proceeded to enroll in beginning philosophy, life drawing and art history under pretexts of studying liberal arts. Little by little however I began to involve myself more and more deeply with art; and in my senior year I abandoned all caution and became a Fine Arts major.
During my time in college I would consider "what to become." The possibilities seemed endless; I felt I could be anything I wished; it was only a question of what would be most worthwhile to devote my life to. I rejected science, philosophy, scholarship, commerce and pedagogy as sufficiently worthwhile pursuits. Only divinity, I concluded, or the life of an artist were good enough and Lacking the vocation for the former I chose the latter reasoning that through art one could be as close as possible to the Creator without being a monk or a priest, as art to me was essentially about the divine prerogative: about Creation itself.
When I began taking art courses I was immediately drawn to photography. From my point of view photography with its arcane technique was most seductively exotic, and along with basic design courses I took courses in that medium to the extent that I had soon accumulated the required credit hours for a major a major in photography. It was about that time when I was also becoming increasingly frustrated with what I felt were photography's limitations for subjective personal expression, with its inability to express inner events, so I turned to photo printmaking as a way to extend photography into more subjective, self-expressive avenues. In the meantime I continued taking courses in drawing and painting before finally releasing photography altogether in my junior year, when I summoned up the courage to take up painting.
As a young painter I was very interested in the work of Picasso. He was the first artist whom I undertook to study at any depth, and his ideas and vast bodies of work awed me. I also studied the new cutting edge art: Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual Art. And then I became interested in what I termed "the elements of art."
There seemed to me to be something --what I called the elements of art-- that all art possesses regardless of style or sophistication. There seemed to me to exist a basic kind of impulse, an elemental, universally understood truth or attitude toward life and creation present in all artistic efforts that spanned time, place and culture. I detected the presence of these intangible elements in the art of what I called "grassroots" artists: the naive "artist," unaware of being an artist and working outside of a mainstream historical artistic tradition with only a personal sense and motivation prompting an urge to make "works of art."
I was only too aware that one need not necessarily use paints or marble to make works of art; Picasso had demonstrated that. Art it seemed to me like life was not in the physical objects themselves. Art was that undefinable soul, the between-the-lines spirit that animates and expresses itself through the art object. It was clear to me that the outward manifestation of art, like nature's own would take endless forms yet be subject to the same mysterious, undefinable laws or forces that unify all life and all art.
One of these artists, Mrs. Scott, an 84-year-old Black woman in Gainesville, arranged her modest furnishings, plants and knickknacks in powerful and eloquent ways far transcending interior decoration. I could see purposeful consistency in her instinctive choices of objects that elevated her "environmental installations" to the realm of art.
In the course of these meditations and investigations I undertook to photograph Mrs. Scott's home and the garden of two Cuban bachelors in Miami whom I felt to be grassroots artists in their own right. The men had marvelously filled their large tropical garden with all types of objects (mirrors, bottles, bird cages, figurines, airplane seats...), creating a series of truly magical outdoor environments. In 1972 I exhibited the photographs and gave a slide lecture on them in Art History class.
Between 1973, when I received my Bachelor's degree, and 1976 when I enrolled in graduate school I worked and painted at home. At first I painted mostly still-lives distinctly influenced by Picasso. Later I began to work on abstract compositions. One of these artists, Mrs. Scott, an 84-year-old Black woman in Gainesville, arranged her modest furnishings, plants and knickknacks in powerful and eloquent ways far transcending interior decoration. I could see purposeful consistency in her instinctive choices of objects that elevated her "environmental installations" to the realm of art.
There was a connection, I sensed, between abstract and figurative art. I was intrigued by Picasso's discovery that bones look as if they have been modeled out of clay by a hand. The idea that an abstract process seemingly detached from surface appearances was responsible for determining outward form was most revealing to me. In that sense it would be nature that had derived from abstraction, not abstraction from nature. If so one need only go directly to the abstract source altogether bypassing the need to interpret outward forms. Conversely the study of nature could eventually lead one to these invisible sources that are at the root of all creation.
Picasso showed the reversal by departing from nature to approach abstraction. But Picasso, it seemed to me, had drawn a magic circle around himself that did not admit of pure abstraction. His forms, although exaggerated and distorted often beyond recognition always kept referential ties to the phenomenal world. In his statements he would deny time and again the possibility and legitimacy of pure abstraction. I was not prepared to accept such a dictum without due investigative process.
Once in graduate school I pursued my interest in the elements of art and in the relationship between abstract and figurative art. Through studying children's and prehistoric man's art I discovered that a continuum, rather than a mutually exclusive polar dichotomy exists between abstract art and "realistic" configuration. I found the two to be so intimately related that it was clear to me that abstraction and realism are actually mutually compatible and necessary to each other, their differences blurring as they merge.
Icould see from children's art and prehistoric examples how abstract marks and signs lead to realistic rendering. As a painting, drawing and printmaking student in graduate school I became increasingly absorbed in exploring my own subconscious self through direct, self-expressive mark-making and through process-oriented interaction with different media.
In particular I was strongly attracted to the drypoint printmaking process whereby a sheet of copper is directly scratched by a sharp steel scriber. The resulting furrow of copper, similar in principle to the furrows made by a plowshare on the earth, is inked and printed, yielding a uniquely varied, velvety line. The physical feel of the steel against the copper and the effortless economy of means that yielded such miraculously rich results exited me and compelled me to use the process as an especially apt medium for directly expressing ideas about abstract energies, linear tensions and the range between abstract and figurative form in ways quite distinct from drawing and painting.
Through graduate art history studies I discovered the uncanny parallels that exist between children's, prehistoric man's and the art of 20th century artists. The work of Klee, Miro and Kandinsky, in particular, share many similar themes, compositions and images with prehistoric man's and children's art. The discovery of these connections, in light of C.G. Jung's illuminations on the collective subconscious as a deep pool of universally shared experiences, was most important to me and opened for me a deeper sense of meaning in art than I had previously conceived.
Finally, my complementary studies in graduate school of Tibetan art and religion prepared me for my later explorations of abstract art's deep connections to religion and spirituality, to its long multi-cultural mystical and esoteric traditions and in general to the tangible expression through visual art of the ineffable, awesome and insubstantial.
I remain ultimately interested in the philosophically provocative questions of the origins, meanings and impulses to art and creation. As nature reveals the Creator art reveals the artist, and by extension Universal Man. It is my aim, as in the words of Picasso to "work like nature, not after her" in expressing and bringing to consciousness through art the mysterious laws of life.
Julio Mateo, 1980