Alvaro was born in San Jose, Costa Rica and came to live in the US when he was thirteen. He attended high school in LA, learned English, graduated, started pounding on a piano in his teens, already attempting to create his own music. He also attended LA City College where he intended to study science (go figure), but also took some classes in composing. His studies ended sooner than even he may have expected: he was just too much of a rebel to study in a school environment. His way was to find himself and his path on his own. So off he went.
He went to Mexico with his first wife to continue his studies in music with Blas Galindo and was about to have a ballet with his music performed when it became necessary to return to the States because his wife had already come back to the States due to her mother’s illness and there she discovered that she was expecting the first of their four children. Living in his wife’s home state of Washington, he had a menial job in a college there. Music was on hold for the time and, in a quandary due to his strong political beliefs and an emerging feeling of something less judgmental in nature, he started to read Asian philosophy and poetry as well as the poetry of Garcia Lorca and other great Spanish writers. His love for and dedication to poetry stems from this time. Music was clearly on hold; he turned his creative energies to writing haiku and poetry.
With a second child born, the family returned to Los Angeles. There he met a number of other poets: Gene Frumkin, Stanley Kiesel, Keith Gunderson and Fred Franklyn all of whom formed a poetry group, the Incognoscenti, which met every week for many years to read and discuss one another’s work. He also met the poet, Tom McGrath, who helped him get his first two books of poetry published.
In the late 60′s, Alvaro left his first marriage and began painting as a way to supplement his earnings, so that he could help his wife and children. At first he copied some of the great painters and was able to sell these occasionally. For nine years he had been working in an insurance company, probably the least likely job he ever should have had–he still has nightmares about those days, literally–but a friend helped him get a job as a magazine editor. There, for the first time, he was happy in a job and began writing articles and short stories, again to supplement his income, but also because writing was in his blood. He also began to teach a private poetry workshop, bequeathed to him by Frumkin who moved on to teach at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. It was at this workshop that I met Alvaro. I too had left my marriage and joined the group to develop my own poetry.
Once he had started painting, as with both music and poetry, he took it just as seriously and moved into an old storefront where he could live and paint, teach and write, basically teaching himself to paint just as he had everything else. As he will tell anyone, he learned by making huge messes. He never painted small in those days; the canvasses were often 6 feet and more in dimension. He had a technique where he hosed them off at a particular point in time. Paint would run out the door into the street. On one occasion, an elderly man came to the door to find out if everything was all right. Bright red paint, like blood, was pouring out from beneath the door.
He painted this way for years and had only one show at a book store in the mid-seventies, a year or two before he and I left California to live and work in St. Paul, Minnesota. There we rehabbed (rebuilt might be more accurate) a large Victorian house. Alvaro painted in the basement, large enough with high enough ceilings for him to continue his “messes” which, by now were hardly that. From wildly beautiful expressionistic canvasses, he gradually developed another, very quiet, serene, style. A student in a poetry class I was teaching shyly asked me one evening if he could buy a painting of Alvaro’s that hung in our living room.
Buy!!? What a concept! Several more sold this way, and since both of us were working only part time–and liking that very much more than full-time jobs–we decided to have a show of his work twice a year. The house was big enough and nice enough by now to function as a gallery.
The long, very cold, winters of Minnesota were always hard for the more tropical Alvaro. We began to get out for two weeks, a month, as long as we could, to what we then considered a much warmer climate: New Mexico. We housesat for some acquaintances in Santa Fe and loved it there. Alvaro’s painting began to reflect New Mexico now when we returned to St. Paul. He would paint colorful landscapes, great distance and the magic of the New Mexico landscape for the rest of the year.
So, in 1986, once our children were grown and flown the nest, we decided to do the same, to live a life the way we’d only ever dreamed about. We came to New Mexico, settled in the village of Truchas which had totally captured our hearts and imaginations years before. Our plan was to live quietly there, to write and paint and deepen in our arts. We had no real idea how we were going to survive except through Alvaro’s paintings. He had had two shows in Santa Fe a few years before, had been in one gallery there, so we thought it would be a cinch. Well, it wasn’t. But we never looked back, never for a second regretted coming to this beautiful land. Now, with our own gallery, each of us with our own studios, we are here for the duration.
For a fuller, less chatty, biography, please see Alvaro’s resume on this blog. And please take a look at his paintings at www.cardonahinegallery.com.
