Pablo Cesar Amaringo Peruvian artist Country: Peru

Pablo Amaringo Biography

Pablo Amaringo was born in Puerto Libertad, a small village on the banks of the Ucayali River near Tambo, Peru. He was the seventh of 13 children in his family, who were small farmers. Despite speaking the native Quechua language, his parents taught their children Spanish. Pablo completed two years of education before his father left the family. Due to their financial difficulties, the family had to move to the city of Pucallpa, where Pablo attended school for another two years.

At the age of 10, Pablo was introduced to the ancestral traditions of his ancestors, specifically the tradition of ayahuasca, a visionary "brew" made from the plants yagé and chacruna. However, the family's difficult circumstances forced Pablo to leave school and start working to support his family. At 15, he found employment at the docks in Pucallpa, where he had various adventures that foreshadowed his career as an artist. He discovered his ability to create counterfeit money using brushes and Chinese ink, which led to his arrest. Escaping from prison, he fled to Brazil, where he worked for nearly two years before returning to the Peruvian jungles.

At the age of 17, Pablo's health issues became so severe that he almost died. With the help of a local healer, he was able to recover. During his healing process, Pablo began dedicating his time to drawing and painting. His early works were pencil drawings shaded with lamp soot. He used whatever materials he could find, such as his sisters' cosmetics for paint and cardboard boxes for paper. A friend who worked at an automobile factory gave him "permatex," a special blue paint used to detect contact points on car parts, which Pablo used to color his drawings. Later, he started using watercolors and ink, and a friend even gave him a few tubes of paint.

Pablo made progress in his artistic pursuits and even earned some money by creating portraits. However, his simple business faced substantial competition when colored photographs became popular. Despite these setbacks, Pablo's criminal past caught up with him, and he spent several months in prison before being released in 1969. Shortly after these events, a forest woman appeared to Pablo in his dreams and taught him the secrets of healing. These experiences, along with his serious illness and healing process, led Pablo Amaringo to embark on the path of a shaman.

Eventually, he became a powerful curandero in the vegetalismo tradition of mestizo shamanism. As a vegetalista, he specialized in working with the plant teacher ayahuasca. Pablo actively traveled the region for seven years, immersing himself deeper into the power of ayahuasca and the spiritual world. After a challenging struggle with sorcerers and spirits, he decided to leave behind shamanic practices and ayahuasca. In 1977, Pablo suspended his shamanic activities and became an artist, interpreting the otherworldly realms of his experiences in his artwork and working to preserve the Amazonian environment and culture.

In 1988, he founded the Usko-Ayar School, where he taught painting, instructing his students to visualize internally what they intended to create. The school offered free education to students who wanted to become Amaringo's apprentices. Pablo believed that art could help people appreciate and respect nature's beauty and richness. His artwork aimed to reveal glimpses of other dimensions. His work gained recognition in the West through individuals like Luis Eduardo Luna, an anthropologist and ayahuasca researcher, and Dennis Jon McKenna, an American ethnopharmacologist. They collaborated with Amaringo on the book "Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman" (1999).

Pablo Amaringo continued to paint angels, meticulously detailed flora and fauna, and participated in various conferences and seminars, sharing his life as an artist and shaman. He died on November 16, 2009, after a long battle with illness, without being able to attend an exhibition of his works in California. In 1992, he was nominated for the Global 500 Peace Prize by the United Nations Environment Programme, joining the ranks of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Chico Mendes, Jimmy Carter, and others as a true environmental hero.