Auto Art Biography

Childhood. I can still remember my first full sentence. I said it in a shouting manner. I said it after I was interrupted from what I was drawing at the time. Before I spoke, I could only remember people around me, coming and going. I don’t remember interacting with others. I was completely in my own world.

“I am not a slave to time!” I shouted, and for a second, I could hear silence around me. My uncle, to whom I said    it, was amused, but I still recall what he said, “He speaks.” I put my head down and went back to whatever I was drawing.

Later on in life, between six and ten years of age, I would draw portraits of people from magazines or text books and show them to people. I said that I made them, but I was simply criticized and put down. Commonly, people remarked “You, did not draw it.” During these years, I was also focused on drawing buildings, tall buildings. I had scores of notebooks with countless drawings, but during one of our family moves, my grandmother got rid of them. She did not see the importance of what they meant to me. Whatever the reason, I lost a major part of what I could reference from my childhood.

During those years, my world was comprised of bell bottom pants, a tailor shop, a printing shop, and a wood working shop. I did not understand the resources that I had at hand. I had endless amounts of paper from the print shop across the street. At the print shop, I learned to typeset. I was allowed to do only that and was never allowed to run any of the presses. I was taught only in theory how to use them. This helped me later on in life to operate many presses in my teen years and made it easy to learn new and emerging print technologies.

The tailor shop was my step grandfather‘s business that was located in front of our home. There, I learned how to use a sewing machine and, more importantly, how to measure with a ruler to create patterns with chalk on fabric. Inadvertently, I learned advanced mathematics, transforming a two-dimensional drawing into three-dimensional objects.

The neighborhood wood shop used the same principles of transforming raw material into tangible, practical objects. Using the right measurements from a drawing and the right tools for the work to be done, I learned that anything, could be built if imagined or needed.

I had no desire to come to the United States to live. I only thought I might be a tourist in the future, but I was transplanted against my will. I had a clear idea of what I wanted to become in Guatemala. My education in the U.S. had no intellectual challenges except the new language. The contrast in education was grave, and I went from algebra to basic mathematics, from world geography to California geography, from science and art to nothing.

When I came to Los Angeles, I had plenty of time to become a rebel and artist, but I had already embarked on my artistic endeavors at the age of ten.