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DIEGO RIVERA -- MY ART, MY LIFE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (WITH GLADYS MARCH) |
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THREE EARLY MASTERS AMONG THE TEACHERS at the San Carlos, three stand out in my memory. The first was Felix Parra, a conventional painter himself but possessed with a passionate love for our pre-Conquest Indian art. He communicated this enthusiasm to me with such success that it has lived on in me, through many changes of taste and fortune, to this day. The second was Jose M. Velasco, whom I regarded as the world's greatest painter of landscapes. From Velasco, I learned the laws of perspective, and it was he, rather than Parra, whom I followed when I studied on my own. I traveled up and down the country, painting Indians, forests, houses, streets, and churches, all more or less in the manner of this master. The third was Rebull, a man in his seventies, who had been a pupil of Ingres. One day, when a class of about fifty students was painting a model, he singled me out. He found fault with my drawing, but he said, "Just the same, what you're doing interests me. First thing tomorrow morning, come to my studio." The other students flocked around to see what had interested old Rebull enough to extract an invitation to his studio, to which he had admitted no student for twenty years. They could see nothing and ascribed his enthusiasm to a senile whim. But the next day the old man told me what he had discovered in my work was an interest in life and movement. Such an interest, he said, is the mark of a genuine artist. "These objects we call paintings," he went on, "are attempts to transcribe to a plane surface essential movements of life. A picture should contain the possibility of perpetual motion." Rebull made me more aware than I had yet been of the laws of proportion and harmony, within which movement proceeds, and which are to be discerned in the masterpieces of all ages.
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