The Galdames painter José Ángel García Totorika dies with a legacy of 800 paintingsDEIA
Born in Galdames and resident in Plentzia, José Ángel García Totorika, remained active “until the last moment”, his relatives assured when announcing his death at the age of 83. After more than sixty painting, he bequeaths more than 800 works that in recent years he had begun to share through his website. A heritage that his family will disclose in a retrospective exhibition in his memory.
At the age of 16, his artistic vocation awoke, which crystallized in his first exhibition in 1966, when he was 25. Until the 1980s He combined painting with his work as a publicist. In that first stage he captured “the traditional Basque theme, masterfully portraying people who represent effort and culture.” Man, the sea, the countryside and travel “became his main inspirations.” To translate them into painting she relied “on a very exhaustive prior photographic study with the aim of obtaining all the necessary information.”
The stroke he suffered in 2002 marked a before and after. “It left him with scars, but it also meant a vital and artistic rebirth.” A week after being discharged from the hospital, “without speaking,” he learned to use a pencil with his left hand and “completed several large-format paintings with surreal dream drawings that “Doctors use it as research material.” As a result of that experience “he radically changed his compositions, themes and palette to adopt a more expressionist and colorful style”.
A vital phase in which he experimented with different techniques: oil, charcoal, wax, wash, acrylic, and watercolors on paper, board and canvas, but also on other unconventional supports. His series about pirates, Don Quixote, witches, arrantzales, mythological beings and Vikings date from these years, without abandoning the Basque themes of his beginnings.
All over the world
His paintings can be admired in Europe, Japan and the United States, “thanks to the work of his dealer and friend for more than forty years, Félix Didimo”, and also on his website, www.garciatotorika.com “to share his work ”.
