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LUIS CARAOS O i l P a i n t e r
Luis Caraos says “When you grow up in Tiaong it is very easy to love the outdoors,” - Tiaong being a quiet, sleepy town in rural Quezon Province, Philippines. Only a few hours drive from the countrys' capital city Manila, Luis' birthplace is nevertheless a thoroughly unspoiled and rustic area steeped in natural beauty. Growing up around Tiaongs' coconut farmlands and weaned on the simple joys of a small town life has molded Luis into the nature lover that he is, and this is evident in his works which evoke the stillness and ethereal beauty of nature; the many scenes and landscapes of his childhood. His parents, Lorenza Amat and Cipriano Caraos, were both intrinsically artistic persons and were quick to recognize and support young Luis' creative
talents. He was sent to the Cannosian Catholic College for his elementary education and then to the Ateneo de San Pablo, a Jesuit high school. For college, he went further afield to Manila to study at the University of Santo Tomas College of Architecture and Fine Arts where he was a Deans' Lister and was graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Architecture.
Luis began drawing and painting even as a child and knew even then
what he really wanted to do in his life. As a young boy, he garnered the First Prize plum in a painting contest for his portraiture of a beggar, an artwork in tempera. Throughout college, he continued to win many design competitions, gaining knowledge and honing his skills in various art media such as watercolor, pen and ink and charcoal drawings. He especially remembers one of his art professors, Antonio Austria, a renowned Filipino artist, who served as Luis' inspiration and mentor in landscape rendering and plein air painting. His architectural discipline also gave him the chance to master proportion, tone, and color theory. Color became his forte and with this, he excelled all the more in perspective renderings and architectural presentations, while continuing to feed his passion for art by painting portraits and landscapes in watercolor.
Marriage brought him from his hometown in Tiaong to migrate to New York in 1987. His first job in the US was at the University of New York; later on he moved to Joseph Lombardi Architects as Architectural Designer in 1990.
A few years later Luis went on a career change and studied Nursing at the Queensborough Community College, earning his second degree in 1997. He says, "Nursing has become my professional job and oil painting my way of life," managing both lives with the ease of someone whose life experiences have taught him well.
For his art, Luis zealously pursued formal art training in oil painting under Rick Buchannan and took the time to attend several lectures and the various art demonstrations given by John Howard Sanden of The Art Students League of New York. Luis is greatly influenced by artists like John Singer Sargent, Kevin McPherson, Sergie Bogart and Ovanes Berberian, particularly their works on Still Life and Plein Air.
It is in his day to day lives and personas, being concurrently a nurse and an oil painter that has brought Luis to the artist that he is today. He saw his painting style change as his life changed. He says, “When I moved from one career to another my life changed and the people around me changed, and all these differences have made an impact on my views, my feelings, my experiences and finally in the art that I create. My art evolves as I evolve."
His works may sometimes be considered as representational paintings which depict impressionistic/romantic landscapes, in the way he uses a method of glazing and building up surfaces. His brushstrokes are busy -- because he wants to show life and vitality -- yet there is an interplay of softness and an ethereal quality which plays softly on sharp areas. Luis creates bold, confident strokes and surfaces that could be lost and then found; he is a master at playing alternating patterns of strength and delicacy, weaving tight strokes to a counterpoint of looseness and fluidity. For Luis, this rhythmic altercation is akin to life, an artists' rendering of the gamut of emotions that we all experience in our lives . Luis' art is a personal avowal of what he has come to know in his life and this knowledge is constantly melded and blended into his innate style. Luis does not follow a particular recipe of colors- he “invents” his own color combinations and is unrestricted and
unrestrained by the color wheel formula, instead intuitively going beyond it. For him, color is almost infinite. Nature is his guide but he follows his own instincts as though there were a sacred, secret connection between his works and nature.
Luis admits that it is difficult to exactly describe his art. Part of his painting process is what he calls his "signals," - he waits for a certain inexplicable cue and when it does arrive, he feels he is almost drawn into a trance-like state. “I can feel my painting coming to life and as difficult as it is to explain it, this is just what happens." Luis admits that he is always nervous during the final stages of creating an artwork, not quite knowing that he is fully sated and satisfied with what he has produced. It is always a challenge to create art that he is truly satisfied with because for him, the sense of satisfaction is not always there when he needs it and this leads to an inner turmoil during his entire painting process.
He has also come to realize that there are times when his passion is not enough to drive his motivation to reach a certain level and this is when he needs to commune with nature to attain inner balance and find the center for his life and his art.
To achieve this inner balance and to keep his work always fresh and new, Luis keeps himself keenly inspired by going on frequent nature walks through Cunningham Park, Captain Tilly Park, Jamaica Estates, Kissena Park, Oakland Lake Park – beautiful oases of nature all around the community where he lives in Queens, New York. He continues to study nature in all its forms though outdoor sketching sessions, photography, or by delving deep into his memories and his imagination. And then sometimes, it is enough that he is in his studio, amongst the art that he has created or deep within his mystical dream world, discovering what further captivates his senses, unveiling what he considers to be the true meaning of beauty which is “that which is found in a dream.”
Luis Caraos continues to exhibit his paintings in New York and New
Jersey. He has also been exhibited in Washington DC.
Luis won the 2002-2003 Individual Artist Showcase Competition sponsored by the Queensborough Public Library. In 2004, he won fourth place in the 51st Annual Regional Exhibit “The Hudson Artists of New Jersey.”
Current affiliations include The Associated Liaison of Fine Artists Unlimited (ALFA) Unltd. (C0-Founder), The Hudson Artists of New Jersey, The Alliance of Queens Artists and The Queens Council on the Arts. He was also a member of the Rockaway Artists Alliance (RAA), the Brown Strokes on White Canvas, the Society of Philippine American Artists, where he was elected Board Member, the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (BWAC) and the Flushing Town Hall.
For Luis Caraos, life-artist, the best is yet to come.
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