Every caricature that I create is a challenge

I was an introverted kid, so the paper and pen were my best friends. I started drawing, and it was a really good way to start connecting with things that I saw through the window.

I started learning oil painting when I was 17 years old. However, my learning wasn’t from an academy, but from informal ateliers. For me, it was a really good opportunity.

Here in Peru, art is really expensive to study: the materials, the social connections for the position that you can have, the time that you spend learning. But I knew what I wanted to do. I was painting and I was learning the fundamentals of anatomy, light, texturing, colour, and the canvas that are all so important. When I was going to be a painter, I was learning from still life.

After that, I was doing portraits. The base of my caricature work is the portrait – the realistic portrait. Artists ask me ‘Why do your caricatures look like oil paintings? What is your technique?’ It’s because my base is in oil painting.

I was never really attached to realism. Some artists say that doing realistic things is boring. I don’t think so. I think that the caricature gives you the opportunity to create another level of realism. This I call super realism.

It’s like fantasy. Fantasy is most important when you want to do art, and fantasy is always connected with human nature. When we’re kids, we’re fantasising about the world. The caricature is like taking that average reality to create another reality – the super-reality.

Caricature creates something that you’re feeling, and that makes you read what you see as beyond realistic proportion. But you can see the expression and something that’s connecting and communicating.

I’m really concerned about anatomy. First of all, everyone is reading anatomy; it’s just like how everyone reads emotion through facial features. We’re all experts in how we read emotions by the way our muscles are moving, how they’re working. As artists, we can represent them with lines, and that takes experience. It takes time to do that representation on paper, with a pen or with a brush. And it’s so important.

Anatomy is something that’s complementary with perspective. Then, later in the process, even if you’re working in grey, or black and white, or colours, you need to understand how light works because, finally, light creates the volume and creates the sense of distance.

Our eyes are the tool to understand how the fundamentals work together, and that understanding creates an immersive experience, allowing us to feel what we are seeing. And that’s amazing.

First of all, there’s always the observation. In the beginning, the most important process is observation because this gives you the sensation. I’ll be feeling nervous. I never know what I’m going to do or how it’s going to end.

Secondly is the sketching. And there’s not just one sketch. I can do 20 sketches. You’re retouching all the time and you’re fixing what you’re doing. Just like a sculptor, I’m going from the big size to the smaller size. I clean the drawing in the sketch. When I’m creating, I include force lines, and that’s so important.

I also restructure and refine proportions. I’m always working with edges that coordinate because they’re the perfect guide. Also, if you place the light source in the wrong direction, the expression can be missed. So where you’re going to focus your light is important.

That’s something Norman Rockwell was always working with. It’s like Leonardo da Vinci said: we’re not painting things, we’re painting the light.