Or.
The Degenerate 😳
Hey! I'm back! Anyway, wanna talk about the tiger?I wanna talk about the tiger. Let’s talk about the tiger!
Good old Damian Barroso, part of the Alex and Taj universe. Friend of our dear Tatiana and known painter from the early XX century.
So he's the tiger that was behind Tatiana on an old thing I posted last year. He's a vanguardist painter who currently resides in México and his studio happens to be Tatiana's favorite place to hide when in the Americas.
Some of you might remember that Tatiana as a character is a bit of a mashup of historical figures. Mainly, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Trotsky and Friday Kahlo. Well Damian is one also.
He is a mashup of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Luis Buñuel and funnily enough, Frida Kahlo again.
Long story short. He was born and lived the first years of his life in México until his family moved to Spain and where he got an artistic education. He does work all around Europe including Germany which would years later have him get the label of Degenerate Artist by the nazis.
He, as a communist, gets involved in the early stages of the Spanish Civil War which is actually where he first meets Taj, Alex and of course Tatiana.
He eventually comes back to México as a refugee where he starts learning about the Mexican artistic scene. Spends his last savings in a small but nice studio in the outskirts of Cuernavaca where he resided for most of the rest of his life.
He got married early in his life but things didn't work and they separated even though they never made the divorce official. He never married again but he did have several other couples, most of them casually and who knows. Tatiana may be in that list. Almost certainly I'd even add.
She may even have been a bit of a muse for him from time to time and appeared in some of his paintings.
In this piece we can see a compilation of his work all over the years passing through many of his artistic phases, which explains the change in styles.
That's actually one of the reasons this thing took so long, that and that a couple of weeks ago my family had a situation. It got solved already but it has taken me some time to get my “groove” back, and a lot of the groove I had went into commissions but still sorry for no posts in a while.
The fun thing about the paintings is that all of them were painted on the same file. And it is a procreate file which means that there's a Timelapse for that included here.
Short: https://youtube.com/shorts/86DUpqD-GUw
And Long: https://youtu.be/F8kVfnfAB3c