biography of Alfredo de Batuc:

Later, I learned that in 1950, in an out-of-the-way pueblo in the Sierra Madre mountains of northwestern Mexico, I had been born. I lived there until my thirteenth birthday when, as an earnest adolescent, I chose to leave my known universe and packed off to do time in a Roman Catholic seminary. After three years of intense application and near-daily revelations, my cup ran over with matters divine, and I returned to the company of sinners.

By now, after the death by drowning of my home town, my family was established in Hermosillo, the state capital. There I began to attend art shows, and inspired by this heady environment, I tried to create such things myself. So I enrolled at the Academia de Artes Plásticas and soon was participating in art exhibits, doing illustrations for a poetry journal, organizing a cinema club, and among sundry other activities, acting on stage.

In search of a larger stage, I left for Mexico City at the age of twenty-five, but roundaboutly ended up in Los Angeles and settled there.

I continued more or less as before, sometimes lured onward by tantalizing mysteries, often times prodded rudely by the prosaic business of keeping alive.

While pursuing my studies and creating individual works, I became interested in the possibilities of multiples and got involved with serigraphy and Self Help Graphics. Meantime I worked as a preschool teacher, free lance story board artist in the fringes of the film industry, gallery tour guide, among other episodes.

All along I continued producing and selling my art privately, but only in 1984 did I start exhibiting my art professionally. Since then I have shown mostly in Los Angeles, but also in other towns from Kyoto to Kampala, San Francisco to San Bernardino, Madrid to Mexico City among others. At the same time I illustrated a series of children’s books about the California missions, for two years I did penance, like a captive, in a Fellini-esque art factory that manufactures paintings, finished a public mural in the heart of Hollywood to honor the late film star Dolores Del Río, and have kept creating and exhibiting my work.

At times, when I look out from the balcony of the apartment where I live and glance at a singed palm frond or a candy bar wrapper floating in the most un-Hochney-esque swimming pool, somehow I am reminded that in the house of my childhood, fish swim.

Alfredo de Batuc
Hollywood, USA
1992
(With thanks to Stephen Grace)