Rodrigo Lois

Biography

Rodrigo Lois was born in Chile in 1953. After a career in Molecular Biology, in 2002 while undergoing chemotherapy he discovered art.

 

Artist Statement

I began to explore painting only a few years ago. It must have been being face to face with my mortality that gave me the need to find ways of expressing myself other than through the logical, the pragmatic and the “shy-away-from-the-mysterious-or-the spiritual” that my scientific upbringing molded on me. I began painting what I saw outside, but quickly I began to understand what my only art teacher, Donna Hanna-Chase, was always hinting at, an that is, that the path to art is through the soul. I began to see that one has but to look inward to reach a wealth of images that represent what it is to be human, images that at times take a dimension that is much larger than ourselves. The essence of creativity is having the courage to open the doors to our inner world and to allow whatever wants to come to the surface and to just record. To just record in the form of colors an lines and shapes on canvas or clay or whatever medium, to just record.

In doing so, the imagery that has started appearing in my painting and sculptures has more and more taken a spiritual aura that doesn’t cease to astound me, or better said, to astound that pragmatic, no-non-sense, material and objective part of me. What fills me with awe is the fact that none of the imagery that appears on these art objects has been imagined or even pictured by this mind of mine before it has taken form on the canvas or the clay.