Ignacio Barrios

Biography

Ignacio Barrios was enrolled at the Roque Díaz elementary school in Zacualpan from 1937 to 1945 and skipped almost all of it, going off to the fields to draw. He repeated the second and third grades and was reprimanded by his father every week. He made his own brush by tying a few horsehairs to a twig.

He was born on 10 March 1930 in Mineral de Zacualpan, State of Mexico, the youngest of five children. His father, Eustolio Barrios Hernández, was a miner and farmer, and his mother was Isabel Prudencio Flores. Every morning his father walked the nearby forests to guard them against illegal logging. For years the family made its living by selling flowers and fruit from their own plot; later these impressions returned in his still lifes of brightly coloured flowers. He painted his first watercolour, by his own recollection, at the age of seven or eight.

In 1946 Barrios left his home village and arrived in Cuernavaca, in the state of Morelos, where an acquaintance had promised him painting lessons. Instead he was handed a wide brush and a can of paint and told to paint the wall of a shop. He later called it, with some humour, his first real job as a painter. A year later he moved to Mexico City where, by his account, he met Diego Rivera almost at once. Rivera helped him to enter the San Carlos Academy (1948) and gave him advice on drawing and colour.

Barrios spent seven months at the Academy. Then, for a year (1948–1949), he studied at La Esmeralda, the school of painting and sculpture, where Raúl Anguiano taught drawing. In 1949 he worked as a sign painter at Eureka Rótulos Neón, a neon-sign workshop, and there met Alejandro Tajonar Torres, his first patron. From 1950 to 1952 Tajonar paid him a regular salary so that he could study under Ricardo Bárcenas at the Escuela Libre de Arte y Publicidad, the Free School of Art and Advertising. Of the teachers of those years he also named Carlos Inclán and General Ignacio Beteta. After winning a drawing competition he joined the airline Mexicana de Aviación as a draughtsman. There his second patron, José Antonio Patiño, realised that commercial drawing was not for Barrios, and paid for his journeys around the world and a number of exhibitions. From 1965, with Patiño’s support, he worked only in watercolour.

In the end Barrios left academic education, deciding that it did not satisfy him, and went on learning by himself. Bárcenas’s influence is visible in his early drawings, Beteta’s in his first landscapes. From William Turner, according to reports, he took ways of handling texture and atmosphere, and from the American watercolourist John Marin a free brushstroke and the use of moisture.

He began with classical, academic landscape. Critics note his path from costumbrismo, the genre of everyday local scenes, to Impressionism and Surrealism, and later he sometimes set figurative work aside for semi-abstract pieces. His subjects include Mexican and foreign landscapes, city views, seascapes, still lifes, the nude figure and portraits. From 1965 to 1981 he painted in greys and ochres; a large part of his development took place in Europe. In the 1980s his palette became more varied. He said himself that he let water “speak its own language”.

His first solo exhibition was held in 1964 at the Palacio Cantón in Mérida, Yucatán. Later his work was shown in Jamaica, the United States, England, Canada, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, Poland, Argentina, El Salvador and Colombia, as well as in the Soviet Union, Ukraine and Estonia. In 1981 the Círculo de Acuarelistas de México, the Mexican watercolourists’ association, awarded him its prize for best watercolour for the painting “El Valle del Silencio” (“The Silent Valley”). In 1986 the State of Mexico gave him the José María Velasco Medal. From the 1980s he taught; his students are said to include Gabriela Abud and Ulises Castro. In 2004, at the reopening of the Watercolour Museum in Toluca, a tribute was held for him and a permanent display of his work was opened there. The programme “Noticiero Continental de Cine”, a Latin American newsreel, devoted nine episodes to him.

Ignacio Barrios died in Mexico City on 22 January 2013.