Paintings ship direct from Pucallpa, Peru from Pablo Amaringo's Grandson, Jose Luis Vasquez Gonzales.
Please contact us directly for the name of the painting, which the family is requesting to be kept private for plagerism issues. More photos of the paintings available by request.
Goauche on Arches Paper
76cm by 56cm
22.05 x 29.92 inches
Pablo Amaringo (1938-2009) is one of the world’s greatest visionary artists, and is renowned for his highly complex, colourful and intricate paintings of his visions from drinking the Ayahuasca brew.
He trained as a curandero in the Amazon, healing himself and others from the age of ten, but gave this up in 1977 to become a full-time painter and art teacher at his Usko-Ayar school. His book, Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman, co-authored with Luis Eduardo Luna, brought his work and the rich mythology of the Amazon to a wide audience in the West.
Pablo Amaringo was born Puerto Libertad, in the Peruvian Amazon. He was ten years old when he first took Ayahuasca—a visionary brew used in shamanism, to help him overcome a severe heart disease. The magical cure of this ailment via the healing plants led Pablo toward the life of a vegetalismo in which he worked for many years.
What led Pablo Amaringo to begin painting? (From Interview with Howard Charing)
Years passed and I used to say to my mother, when I am older I will paint several pictures of myself so that after I am dead people will know there has been a painter in the family! One day I was asked to accompany a foreign gentleman because I spoke a little English but I did not know that he was the biologist Denis McKenna. After some years he recommended me for a job in Sepagua but I was not able to take it up because my mother fell ill. So when he came back in 1985 I asked him if he would show my pictures in an exhibition he was organizing in Switzerland. They were small pictures, but later he returned with Luis Eduardo Luna who said how beautifully you paint Pablo. I can promote your work; do you want to be a world class painter?
I said no, I don’t want any of those things. I don’t know what a ‘world class’ painter is. I just want you to help me sell my pictures to make a little money. I was portraying the daily realities of people in the Amazon, how they sow and harvest, how they fish and celebrate their fiestas and so on. Luna said how is it I haven’t met you before now? Every year I have been coming for the last eight years, travelling up the Amazon through Brazil and Peru to Panama!
I asked him why he came. What was he looking for? We are interested in the magical plants of Peru from the coast, Sierra and Selva. I know what you are after, I said. I used to be a shaman ten years ago, what a shame you didn’t know me before, but now I have put all that behind me. I could have told you so much about what I had seen, I said. Then I started to think that I could paint for him all the things I had seen in my visions and all the things that were explained to me. But I had to do it in secret because even when people saw photos of what I painted, they said I had gone mad, that I was bedevilled and painting things of the demon!
They worried me with these remarks. I could never have had an exhibition here in Pucullpa. So Luna said paint for me then! And I made two pictures of visions for his next visit, and when he saw those pictures – one of which is in the Museum of Washington DC and the other in the University of Stockholm – they took hundreds of pictures of them. But I said he could take them away. And that’s what they did, wrapped up in a huge box. They sold them and sent me the money. After that they said we don’t want any more landscapes, only visions!
They studied them and said they found language and biology in the pictures so later I began to make explanations of them. But I could never show them to people here. That’s how it all started.
The pictures are a means by which people can cross spiritual boundaries. Some people say they can only believe what they see, but there are thing which exist which cannot be seen. The pictures are for reminding people what we are and where we come from and where we are going. They are for people of any culture in the world although there is much that is taken from indigenous Amazonian culture. For example:
‘A Fines Espirituales’ (Spiritual Endeavour)
In this painting there are horses like humans, humans with tiger’s heads and a papagayo with a human body and so on. Looking at this painting, it reminds us of many of the Amazonian legends in which animals adopt human forms, does this painting relate to these stories?
That is correct, spirits cannot materialize easily, if they cannot take human form, they take animal form. They are made from the spirits of animals, but if they appear human, then they can reproduce with women in order that they can be incarnate in us. This is what you can discover through the visions of Ayahuasca and other plants like toé, chric sanango, ajo sacha etc. assuming you do the diet correctly, then the invisible world can become manifest to us. It is part of our mystic evolution. Everyone has a role to play inspiring, creating, evolving their minds to preserve the world. The spirits are working untiringly to protect Mother Nature – everything from the plants and animals to the circles of the planets.