Today we’d like to introduce you to Romulo Martinez.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I believe that we are born with many talents to develop in life. They are seeds that wait to germinate from an early age, and once germinated with the first manifestations of those talents, it is up to us to enhance the growth of that plant, watering it, fertilizing it, or, on the contrary, set it aside and let it dry. I decided to cultivate that small plant over time, first in a self-taught way, trying to represent, imitate, and copy through drawing as best as possible a photograph or image from a book or newspaper.
Already with a certain technique developed, I decided to take that passion to a professional level, that is, studying a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts at the University of Zulia, in my homeland Maracaibo, where I could acquire knowledge, concepts, techniques, visions, and way of seeing art. Once this goal was achieved, I gave myself the opportunity to do a master’s degree in Spain at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, with the purpose of experiencing the development and conduct of contemporary arts from another perspective of country, history, and geography.
After these studies, I returned to my country with new personal visions for the work I wanted to develop and with preparation to work in teaching. I worked as a teacher at my alma mater, and artistically, I walked through various concepts related to painting as a matter and living entity, concepts that led me to hold large exhibitions with montages and installations in different museums and cultural centers in Maracaibo and Caracas.
Seeing my dreams cut short by a political regime that does not help to dream or plan life, I felt the need to emigrate in search of social, economic, and emotional security. First, I lived in Bogotá, Colombia, for 3 years with 2 exhibition projects carried out, and now living 6 years here in the USA with 4 exhibitions under my belt between galleries and cultural centers.
What represents me as a person is art and artistic creation. I cannot do without doing something with an aesthetic, artistic nature, and my story begins in those first steps of my life where I expressed my taste, pleasure, and predilection for the creation. My life is present in every work I make because in each one of them, my worldview of life and art is present. This is a story that has already started, with a few chapters already read; there are still other chapters left that I hope to be able to write and show to you.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Struggles and challenges will always be present in daily life, within any career, discipline, or trade in which people consider dedicating themselves in life.
Throughout my professional career, I have gone through many personal, family, and social challenges, which had an impact on me, leaving me with lessons about life and strength in the face of adversity.
It has been a path of struggle, of being brave and persistent in achieving my dreams and desires, maintaining my desire to express myself through the visual arts and not through other means.
There have been rocks and thorns along the way, but also on this path, I have been able to smell, see, and touch the flowers through the exhibition opportunities in professional spaces that my own efforts have offered me through the works and projects that I have done, and the help and support of unconditional people such as curators, art researchers and gallery owners, who have believed in me and what I do, and who have accompanied me in the development of my ideas, my questions and aesthetic proposals.
For me, time is the great master of teaching in life. He shows us our successes and mistakes; he teaches us through the good and the bad that, with the passing of time, we can see from a distance that those rocks are broken or have already been jumped over and overcome, leaving behind lessons learned and wisdom.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I define myself as a plastic artist who loves, enjoys, and is passionate about artistic creation. To use different techniques for aesthetic, artistic, convergent and dialogue purposes within the same support. This is what I have dedicated myself to in the last 20 years of my professional life, with 13 individual exhibitions held in galleries, museums, and cultural centers, the last 2 being REFLEJOS at Daisha Board Gallery in 2022 and FOR GOOD OR BAD at the Oak Cliff Cultural Center last year. And currently developing an exhibition to be shown in August and September of this year at the Latino Cultural Center, an exhibition in which I will talk about Hispanic migrants and the things we have in common coming from different latitudes throughout Latin America.
It has been a very laborious career but also very satisfying, as I have been able to see my mental, conceptual, and manual potential through the evolution of my artistic language and in the responsiveness of converting a floating idea in the mind into matter, into an aesthetic object.
The explosion of color reigns and identifies my work. Color inspires me along with nature, society, the lives that surround me, and my own life with its introspective searches and journeys. All this inspires me to express my concepts plastically within natural, urban, and surreal contexts, with symbolic and humorous charges between the unexpected and the capricious, letting me differentiate myself and be recognized by the color palette used and the ways in which the shapes are represented.
There are a variety of techniques converging on the same support, but the drawing stands out among them, which is the real, perceptible, and representative basis of my work. From which the graphic arts, printing, and painting emerge and are subordinated, to be the choir that sings behind the drawing.
I see my works overtime, and I must confess that they fill me with satisfaction, since each one of them has its own magic, my DNA, it’s a connection with each mental/technical stage of my history. They are with me, and I am with them; this is a question that delights me, and I am happy to possess a work that is mine and that speaks about me when I am not present.
What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
There are many qualities, characteristics, that are part of what I do, of my success. They are a conglomerate of variables that define my artistic practice and that, in turn, support each other to give development and solidity to my work, such as authenticity, persistence/discipline, patience, and separation.
Authenticity lies in following my personal/artistic instincts without looking sideways or through others’ windows. The transparency of being able to say that my idea and my reflection were what made my work fills me as an artist without falling into betrayal against my convictions arising from my personal worldview about life, art, and creation. I only let myself be guided by my own thoughts, insights and what my materials communicate to me.
Being stubborn, disciplined and persistent keeps me alive in creativity and creation, keeps me in touch with myself perennially so as not to disassociate myself from what I am passionate about doing, leading me to give everything without falling into selfishness towards myself. Work and the respectability that my ideas demand and suggestions from me.
Giving time in my mind to the thoughts and concepts that I would like to develop, time and patience to discern what I want to communicate and identify myself as such, is an important quality within my work since it gives me the confidence to capture on a canvas the idea sketched on paper that I want to express along with the technical challenges that it may bring me.
And finally, move away and separate me from the work, give it its moment, its space to express itself freely, so as not to fall into suggestions, self-justification and conformism. Give it the floor to define itself and demand what it needs.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.romulomartinez.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/_romulomartinez
- Facebook: facebook.com/romulomartinezart
