Interview with Felipe de la Torre Villalpando: mexican artist

“I was born in Lagos de Moreno, Jal. in 1950.
I had a simple childhood, very close to animals, to nature, thanks to my parents. I am the oldest of four siblings, one female and two males.

Since elementary school, in Lagos, between the ages of 8 and 10, I suspected that I was interested in the arts and architecture, that is, I liked them among many other things. Evidently without knowing why. But my parents, especially my mother, and one of my teachers let me know that there was a why, and, therefore, I had to find out… study.

I became fond of drawing, then painting… other things: music, reading, movies and soccer in a fun, light, playful way. This already in high school. I was interested in observing, seeing, looking… listening and reflecting… I was already a curious, sometimes annoying questioner.

I studied high school in Mexico City, where we had emigrated, and in 1968 I began my studies in architecture at the UNAM where I finally studied drawing and, with the support of my teachers, I began to work as an architect and as a draftsman, my double profession for some years.

I had my first exhibitions and little by little I was more inclined to draw and paint, which led me to dedicate myself completely to what, by then, I considered my profession.

My works are figurative: the emphasis on people and bodies, faces and human emotions, landscapes and animals. Cultivating the questions of existence, of life, of heaven and earth, has been a goal and an essential impulse. Certainties do not satisfy me, I prefer processes to final results.

From the intimately personal to the collective, from dualities and contradictions, from the fanciful to the pragmatic, from the symbolic to the explicit… this is how my work has been, like a pendulum, migrating and I with it, from the I to the we to the others to the other… and vice versa.

I have never, until now, been able to adjust myself conveniently to fashions, to currents and schools of any kind. It is more urgent for me to learn. I am an instrument of my life and of life: of lives. I have no answers, let alone definitive ones, to anything, but many questions for everything.

Maybe that’s why I chose my trade.

I have two children and a granddaughter.
My work is their inheritance.

June 2021”