12MeMorIes And LeGACy

As is so often the case, we attract to ourselves that which we open up to with our conscious-

ness: higher levels of thought, conundrums, and atten-dant enigmas are always waiting at the edge of our abilities to recognize and, hopefully, understand them. Such was the case with my introduction to the art of Pablo Amaringo.

In 1992, shortly after experiencing my first aya-huasca journey, I was glancing through a friend’s library and, either through intuition or serendipity, I pulled out a book that would add significantly to my recently altered consciousness, as well as my artistic expression. That book was Pablo’s Ayahuasca Visions and it featured paintings that amazingly captured, in form and color, an authentic representation of the hallucinatory, holy cosmic yagé opera that any other artist would consider difficult, if not impossible to execute. Those images, however, were profoundly inspirational, and provided the initial stimulus for me to attempt my own interpre-tations of the inexplicable, divinely mysterious, some-times terrifying but gloriously beautiful visual world of ayahuasca.

After that, fortuitously, I had the pleasure of meet-ing Pablo on a number of occasions, both in the United States and in the Amazon, and I can report that I never met a sweeter, more humble individual . . . but with a brilliant intellect, an equally powerful spirit, the wisest of souls, and vast knowledge of the transcendent realms he once traversed as the shaman—vegetalista—that he was. And although Pablo refrained from ingesting the sacrament in his later years, he continued to paint the wonderful visions that overf lowed in his repository of yagé experience. I myself, as an artist, know it would take numerous lifetimes to be able to paint the visions from just one aya journey.

There is just too much, a delicious abundance, of heretofore unknown forms and colors that inundate the inner eye during the journey. I discussed this with Pablo and he agreed that there was not a canvas or palette large enough to capture the smallest iota of the overall ayahuascan visual storm. But Pablo’s creative output was nevertheless Herculean as well as generous. After his retirement from active shamanism in 1977, Pablo started planning for more earth-bound activities, and opened his Pucallpa home to teach painting to orphaned and abandoned children. In 1984, he turned it into the Usko

Ayar Amazonian School of Painting, which flourished and expanded exponentially, producing an abundance of Amazonian master painters, such as Juan Carlos Taminchi and Anderson Debarnardi, among many oth-ers. It was so typical of Pablo to compassionately share the gifts that Mother Huasca had presented to him.

Although Pablo’s technique and color scale can be considered somewhat primitive or naïve by fine-art standards, his depictions of the yagé realms in their manifested power of emotion and otherworldly magic transcend all academic critique. Pablo was also a deeply versed master translator of the ayahuasca mythologies, in which snakes, leopards, celestial palaces, and aliens and their spacecraft all converge on his canvas, present-ing an indigenous encyclopedia of the inner, outer, and transcendent worlds of yagé. Celestial architecture, as well as and in contrast to his underworld iconography, never fails to captivate the viewers and take them on a vicarious journey that offers a view into the dynamic consciousness-altering experience magically exterior-ized through Pablo’s brush and palette.

The high mission of art, through its illusions, is to foreshadow higher states of reality, and no one did this better in the depiction of the ayahuascan worlds than Pablo. Art should inspire, it should reach into the emo-tional center and ring the bell that awakens us to our higher self. This is what all great artists have attempted to do throughout the ages through their own inspired art—an art that comes not from them, but through them from some Higher Power that lures us onto the path of light leading to the ever-elusive but divinely attainable source and center of all Beingness. This is what ayahuasca alludes to in its holy message, and in its absolute brilliance, it has chosen Pablo Amaringo as one of its divine messengers.

bFantastic Realism painter, sculptor, and film artist roberto

Venosa has exhibited worldwide and is represented in many

major collections. In addition to painting, sculpting, and

film design (pre-sketches and conceptual design for the

movie Dune, and Fire in the Sky for Paramount Pictures, as

well as the upcoming Race for Atlantis for IMAX), he has

recently added computer art to his creative menu. There have

been four books featuring his work, including Illuminatus, a

retrospective collaboration with Terence McKenna.

A Holy Message of Absolute Brilliance

roberto Venosa