Drawings she did of her grandmother, show that she could convey depth and expression. He made her correct her drawings until they were perfect, forming her habits of good artistic discipline.Īn early sketchbook of drawings, done by the age of 14, indicates that Remedios had ability for sensitive rendering. Upon seeing her skill, Don Rodrigo taught her the use of the rule, carpenter's square and the triangle. One of her early pastimes was to copy her father's blueprints which helped develop her drawing skills at an early age. Remedios saw and experienced many places abroad that impacted her later work.

The name Remedios means 'remedy'which was given to her because she was the medicine her mother needed to heal from the loss of an older daughter.ĭon Rodrigo Varo was a hydraulic engineer whose study of waterways took the family on many travels throughout Spain and North Africa. She is described as being good-hearted and devout catholic. Her mother was of Basque origin from the northern coast of Spain. He was a man who had a great sense of humor and imagination. Her father, Don Rodrigo Varo y Zejalbo, was from the southern region of Spain, Andalusia, home of flamenco and Gypsies. Remedios Varo was born in 1908 in Angles, Spain. Varo's body of work can be described as a unique universe, that involves science, discovery and the human condition. Creation of the Birds (1958) shows a bird-like.Mystical and intriguing are words that come to mind when you first discover the paintings of surrealist painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963). She was interested in science, in the explorations of space and time, and she saw art as a crucial visionary complement to science. Varo had been trained in the skills of mechanical drawing by her father.

Such works reveal Varo's main concerns: with dreams, with the events of her own life, and with the occult. In Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River (1959), a bowler-hatted woman travels in a waistcoat boat powered by wings on strings through a flooded forest to meet a small overflowing goblet on a tiny table.

Her paintings show slender, attentuated figures with mask-like faces sometimes with wheels for feet, or confined by architectural facades, or built into peculiar vehicles of transport In The Useless Science or the Alchemist (1955), the patient worker cranking the mechanisms of elaborate scientific machines has drawn the chequered floor around her shoulders as if it were a drapery. Remedios Varo had a deep belief in the power of the spiritual in life, in the potent interdependence of people and objects.

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