I interviewed George Rodéz in his studio at the South Florida Art Center on Miami Beach. His studio has two lighted windows to display paintings opening onto the hallway. In one was a stunning 'La Musa' and in the other a new painting in his current series, 'La Cortina de Amelia', a tribute to the Cuban painter from the 1920s, Amelia Pelaez.

George is 38 years old, born in Manhattan in New York City in 1957. His parents were Cubans who had come to the U.S. in the early days of Castro. In 1958 they sent George and his brother to stay with their grandfather in Havana while they looked for work and a home in Miami. By the time they were ready for the boys to join them in Miami, leaving Cuba had become difficult. They were able to return to the U.S. in 1960 only through falsified papers. What's interesting is that George spent very little of his life in Cuba but the cover painting, 'La Guitarra' is one of a series in progress of very strong Cuban consciousness.

"I'm an American," George says, "and I'm very grateful to live in this country, but I feel like my Latin roots are sprouting. This influence has come to me now in my later years. I have developed a fascination for the life of my grandfather and the generations that preceded me."

Actually, this series is a complete departure from the kind of work George was doing when I first met him a couple of years ago. At that time he was doing abstract paintings that he describes as the place where he started his spiritual work, eliminating the negative experiences and influences of his tulmultuous childhood with a father who came in and out of his life and a mother who suffered from severe episodes of depression. In that body of work all the paintings contained an "x".

"It was like x-ing out that part of my life, eliminating all the negative experiences and influences that I'd had in my life. I dealt with it. It was x-ed out. And, somehow, when I was done with that exorcism, I started again at the very beginning of my memory in Cuba on my grandfather's terrace. That painting of the terrace is very clear. I've gone back to Cuba to see what I left behind. The little dog in the doorway from my memory has grown. The parrot is still there but has practically outgrown its cage. It's as though I've come back and renovated everything, made it all fresh."

I asked George about the vision behind his paintings.

"I take the actual experiences and turn them into a visual concept," he explains. "It may not be something I see, but more of an impression. They just manifest themselves. All I do is put my pen to paper or my brush to canvas and just let my subconscious do the rest. I don't think about the end result. I just start and it develops."

I was very curious about the story behind the 'La Musa' in the studio window and how this whole series of Cuban themes started and what lay behind it since it wasn't a Cuba he could have experienced at that young age.

"The freedom carnivals were basically ending when I was born. I recently met one of the reigning beauty queens from the 1957 carnivals. That's the year I was born. They call her "la Musa" and that's where I got the name for the painting. What was shocking to me was that the painting was finished when I met her, and if you look at my painting, she has a number 5 around her neck. When la Musa showed me her photo album, I saw the competition number on the card in her hand. It was number 5! Even the ballgown is very similar, not the colors, but the shape. And the gloves. Everything. When I met her, everything crystallized. I knew that this was what I had to do. I'm creating a body of work for a one-man show. I don't even care if they sell because I will have gotten my message across," he says.

I wanted to know about the message and asked him to expand on that.

He said it began with a commissioned piece for Brazilian designer, Franco de Sá. George started to paint a mask in black and white and red. But, the mask became so ferocious, so full of anger that it sat for two years unfinished. "I guess it was my own issues coming out," he says. "The mask was a beast. The only way I could finish the commission was to paint over the mask with the festive piece de Sá wanted for his client. As George started to sketch in the outlines of the new painting, an eye appeared. The eye came in and he knew there was a 'beast' behind it. That beast", he says, "is the man with the eye. The eye that watches everything. It's in all the paintings in this series.

"The eye," George continues, "is what stopped the carnivals. The eye is in your house. It knows everything you do even if you're indoors. The people live in fear because of the committees, the tattletales. Everyone is in fear. There's been a division created even within the families. That's why I did 'La Mesa de Ronda' with only one chair at the table. I'm showing how the family is divided. There aren't other chairs where a family comes together to the table. It's one person sitting alone."

In the cover painting, 'La Guitarra', the eye is inside the hole of the guitar because in Cuba, music is censored. "I have been listening to black market tapes of music that's against the government. If the censors don't like the words, the music is banned.

My message is pretty loud and clear. It's about a system that totally violates human rights and disintegrates identity. The only identity on that island is the eye, which forces its identity on everything else. So it's about an island that has lost its identity. It's waiting to thrive, but it's just stagnant. Night and day, day and night. Nothing changes."

That's the symbolism of the light blue, dark blue backgrounds in all the paintings of this current series. Night and day, nothing changes. The carnival no longer exists. It's a part of what was. The humans George paints have blank faces, no identity. The eye eliminated it. So, even though George has not been a part of this having grown up in Miami, he feels very strongly that this message has come to him and that he must paint it.

"It just started flowing in a very harmonious way," he says. "I feel that we serve as prisms in the spiritual mainstream. The message comes through the artist and refracts from him to the canvas."

As we concluded the interview and I turned off the tape, I realized that I had grown completely relaxed. That ever-present tension in my neck and shoulders was blissfully absent. The atmosphere in George's studio is soothing, tranquil. I guess his energy is like his paintings, it 'flows in a very harmonious way'. I look forward to seeing George's one-man show. I know it will be stunning, and deservedly so.

Please take a look at the artist's web page on http://justart.com/worldwideart.

Next Article,
Cuban Artist Pablo Carreńo.