EL CAJAS Painting

.html David Moscoso: Andean Nature as a Source of Artistic Creativity This week we're so thrilled to feature our first guest post! Alicia Lubowski-Jahn first introduced us to David Moscoso, an Ecuadorian landscape painter whose work is intriguing and inherently linked to the imagery and environment of The Andean Collection. Below is Alicia's article and interview with David Moscoso: The Ecuadorian painter and muralist David Moscoso is an artist responsive to an artistic heritage of Andean landscape. His combination of sublimity, spirituality, and natural history has been compared to the great North American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), who found in the Andes a sublime wilderness similar to that discovered by Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), Thomas Moran (1837-1926), and others in the Sierra Nevada and Colorado Rockies of the American West. Beyond Moscoso's familiarity with landscapes by artist travelers and the academic tradition within Ecuador, he has also embraced a direct experience of natural landscape that pre-dates European contact. Moscoso has described the Andean inhabitant's communion with nature prior to the Spanish conquest as: "...concrete thought upon things and facts... living and feeling Water, Earth, Wind, Sun in the mind, blending in perfect harmony." Moscoso's vision of Andean nature as a harmonious unity also has roots in both European and Andean cosmologies evident, in particular, in the writings of the nineteenth-century German scientific traveler Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and native Inca mythology. Moscoso's artwork connects an Ecuadorian cultural heritage, what he calls "Andean Memory," with a future forward thinking. This past and present engagement with Ecuadorian art and nature is evocative of the Andean Collection's own dialogue with an artistic legacy grounded in nature. Returning once again to nineteenth-century aesthetic philosophy, which so greatly informs Moscoso's work, Alexander von Humboldt argued that tropical vegetation and the Andean Mountains were landscapes of the greatest aesthetic pleasure because they display the greatest biodiversity and vitality. The scientist noted how within certain tropical regions there is a range of elevation and altitudes that further diversifies the landscape in a vertical ecology. The equatorial alpine landscape that ranges from snowcapped mountain peak to sea level presents a microcosm of global physcial geography (Physique générale): ".