Edgar Leal
Oil painter
Edgar Leal was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1958. He has lived in the United States since 1990. Although he completed some university studies in his home country, he did not receive any formal art training; therefore, his artistic development has been based on trial and error. Due to long work hours in his new country, his artistic practice, that is, his work with pencils and brushes, was sporadic. It was after he turned 54 that time became more flexible, allowing him to dedicate himself more fully to drawing and then transferring those ideas to canvas. My biography, like my paintings, hides nothing. That's where I am right now: Learning to improve.
“ Painting is saying something about what happens in the world and about what happens in our own lives. Each person discovers their own way of expressing things. Even remaining silent is a way of speaking. The colors of thoughts are varied, and the forms very diverse, as many as humans exist. Therein lies the broad spectrum of the fine arts. I chose painting as my form of expression, and since art fulfills a mission in human life, my mission is to give meaning to my time and, if possible, to the time of another, the observer. This giving meaning to time includes two fundamental elements: time as minutes and seconds used appropriately; and historical time with its events, movements, and ideologies that affect human life. From then on, everything is pleasure; the pleasure of transforming ideas into pictorial language. However intricate the subject matter, however controversial or indisputable, the artistic work, the execution itself, from the initial idea to the contact with the materials, from the pencil sketches to the final colors on the canvas, evokes a sense of relief, an inner peace that contrasts with the potentially complex subject matter. That is the blessing of art: art relaxes, art heals, because by freezing the scene of the subject matter, we pause, our lives come to a standstill, we want to observe closely, we want to analyze. This soothes the soul; then new visions of the stories each of us has to tell blossom within us. ”
- Medium
- Oil on canvas or wood
- Style
- surrealism
- Exhibitions
- None
- Upcoming
- None
- Education
- Some universty, but not at arts.
- Awards
- None
- Current projects
- Flesh in process
- Inspiration
- Life and its paths, its ideological tendencies, its entanglements, its dalliances.