My Mother.

by Amadeo Roca

Aristotle said that the object of art was to show the secret essence of things, not to copy their appearance. And it is exactly this secret which Amadeo Roca showed me. Painter from Valencia, introvert, solitary and a great intellectual as well as emigrant artist in Rome, Florence, Paris, and in Spain, in Ibiza, Valencia and Madrid. He achieved the greatest and, according to Rodin, most difficult aspiration of any artist: to create within a tradition, but enriching and widening it.

 

I had just arrived from New York, exhausted from years of The Parsons School and its interminable plans of geometric drawings, and was in need of some sessions of more free and emotional drawing. I wound up at Fine Arts, where Amadeo sent me. Don Amadeo who was a good friend of my grandfather’s José Vives, first cousin of the painter Benedito Vives who in turn together with Pinazo, Cecilio Pla, Genaro Lahuerta and Benlluire (one-time professor of Amadeo Roca) and many others formed the School of great Valentian painters in Rome and Paris from 1870 to 1900.

 

I climbed the stairs to Don Amadeo’s studio together with my aunt who also had her studio of restoration in the same building, up to the fifth floor of Claudio Coello Street 101. He looked me over from top to bottom, the way only he could do, and almost without noticing, I found myself immersed in his world of windows and shutters, in semi-darkness, of lights and shadows and glimmers of colors.

 

Entering to the left amongst Greek statues of Venus and Roman Apollos, hands, torsos and busts I learnt to solve technical problems and the structure of form with absolute loyalty to the model, on the basis of plumb weights. The subtle nuances between light and shade I achieved by way of the serene rigor of charcoal drawing and, most of all, I learnt to resolve esthetic problems by fleeing from mannierisms, use of shocking realism, sensationalism or any shadow of caricature. With Amadeo Roca, I established a very solid base because he showed me how to draw seriously and with discipline, and most of all to be very rigorous, persevering and constant. In spite of the difficulty and obstacles I would meet during my career, he sent me straight on to the Academy of Fine Arts and said to me I had something special. Those valuable obstacles, as he called them, have enriched m, the way he also predicted.

 

His portraits were an exercise of profound penetration of human nature. This one he did of my mother.

 

I applaud the good taste of the council member for cultural affairs María José Catalá. Amadeo Roca was an excellent painter and a great forgotten portraitist who, until now, has not received the honor he deserves.