Honoring Ancestors and the Environment: The Artistic Journey of Jacanamijoy

2023-06-25 13:55:42

At that time, Jacanamijoy kept drawing and writing love letters: from the portraits provided by his clients, he drew the brides and wrote texts that made them fall in love. He also painted landscapes for them.

But one day he got to know the National University, visited its workshops; he saw the teachers with their rolls of paintings and blueprints; He realized that there were other faculties, -cinema, literature-, and he thought: this is what I want. So he applied to the National, entered the Faculty of Fine Arts, and there he was happy.

The day he graduated with a degree that was not a doctor but a Master of Plastic Arts, he did so in the company of 994 other students. He then saw on the walls of the Nursing faculty a graffiti that said “995 new unemployed”. But he wasn’t because he got a job at a newspaper run by the Colombian Indigenous Organization, Onic. He then toured the country, went to an indigenous congress in Mexico and, at that time, thought about finishing philosophy, being a professor of that subject, and painting in his spare time.

But no, Jaca began to send his paintings to the Arte Joven salons, to the regional salons and then he went to the National Salon. However, at that time he continued to make portraits and landscapes, and still could not make a living from art, which was his dream, perhaps because he had not yet found his own language. Until he won two scholarships: one to go to Europe and another for the creation of Colcultura, which later became the Ministry of Culture. Since he could not accept both, he discarded the one in Europe, concentrated on the research one for Colcultura that would last two years, planned to make 25 works, and dedicated himself to finding his own language.

“That scholarship was very revealing for me,” says Jaca.

In those two years, Jacanamijoy found his theme, which is none other than honoring his ancestors and his environment. But, more precisely, that happened one day, during one of the trips he made to Upper, Middle and Lower Putumayo, when he was in the jungle waiting for his father at the house of a shaman friend, he went to cool off in a very beautiful well. where there was a source of water that fell and ran through the ravine until it met a large river. He stayed there for several hours until sunset arrived and the sky was painted with colors and the animals – monkeys, birds, toads – began to hear each other and it gradually got darker until, suddenly, everything was interrupted because a little voice, that of The shaman’s wife told him in Quechua: “You have to be very careful. It’s dangerous at this hour to be in that water. It can be bitten by any animal.” Then he got up, looked at the laughing lady and, at that moment, everything was revealed to him. It was an epiphany “similar to the one Proust’s character Swam experienced, when he touched a cake called a madeleine, all his senses opened up and he entered a wonderful world,” he says.

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