Fiona Murphy, underground portrait artist of Fidel Castro

His photographs are everywhere: in offices, government agencies, and some homes, yet Fidel Castro has not been given to posing for painters, nor have the Cuban authorities encouraged the representation of their leader through any other means than photography. One exception was the Ecuadorian painter Oswaldo Guayasamín—a personal friend of the Comandante—who captured his image in oil paintings of unquestionable expressive force. However, the Irish artist Fiona Murphy, who lived in Havana from 1996 until just a few months ago and has avoided exhibition circles, has painted, quietly and almost obsessively, the face of the former Cuban President, but not charged with the heroism that his name and his figure has been surrounded with, but from the perspective of Castro’s illness, which was publicly announced in 2006.

Fiona Murphy, underground portrait artist of Fidel Castro

I became acquainted with Guayasamín’s work, with his portraits of Fidel, in Quito, Ecuador, and when he became ill, I became obsessed with the topic. Sometimes, they are ambiguous portraits, in which I especially emphasize his eyes and his hands, and lend themselves to different interpretations. Some people have compared these portraits with pictures of Don Quixote, and other people have even found a resemblance to John Lennon! They are almost always large-scale paintings, with strong, vibrant colours, which lessen the sadness that may emerge from them. For me, his eyes, shut, symbolize his illness, and the doubts and comments that every now and then arise regarding whether he is still alive or has died. I have not exhibited these paintings because Cuban curators are quite reluctant to deal with the image of leaders, particularly Fidel’s, and although my starting point is the great respect I have of his person, my view is very far from the “official” position.

Fiona was born in Youghal, Cork County, Ireland, and as a young girl, she wanted to be an ice-cream vendor or an artist. Having chosen the latter of the two, she studied art and photography at Limerick University. During the early years of her career, when she was also employed as a designer in a lamp factory, Celtic elements and graveyard crosses abounded in her work, which were either small murals or large-scale paintings. She travelled to Italy where she became the nanny of a plastic surgeon’s son, and this, together with the anorexia she once had suffered, brought about a strong presence of faces and deformed bodies in her paintings, although her preference for bright colours made them less aggressive. Florentine buildings also became the inspiration of many of her works. After living for a while in Italy, she travelled to Brazil. In this country, she had her first teaching experience at an orphanage run by Catholics, and her inclination towards mural painting was reaffirmed, which is perhaps the reason why she prefers large-scale paintings.

The exuberant Brazilian landscape became an inevitable motif in her work, together with religious themes, which she brought to the frescoes of a small church in Amazonia, to which a number of parishioners, with no academic training, made a contribution. Back in Italy, she had a very successful exhibition of photographs of Brazilian children engaged in labour unfit for their age.

I came to Cuba in 1996 with an Italian boyfriend and began a mural project together with students from the San Alejandro Art Academy,1 as well as other schools and non-professional artists. The aim of those murals was to inform on AIDS in schools, hospitals, Patio de María2 and other places with a large concentration of young people, as there was little public information on the topic then. Later on I became a teacher and head of the Art Department of the International School,3 and during my vacations, I would travel to Quito to teach painting at the San Francisco University. I like teaching because I enjoy the creativity displayed by the students, their imagination, which I help to develop with different means of expression. In Cuba, I had two or three exhibitions in small galleries, at the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital and others in my own home. I painted many pictures that depicted street scenes, everyday life, and especially, Cuban popular dances because their strong rhythm and colourful atmosphere are very much in agreement with my own temperament. The bright Cuban light, the many colours of its scenery, the buildings, the clothes, the graphic design...the energy of Cubans and their unprejudiced use of colours may have all reinforced certain characteristics in my style of painting.

These personal stylistic characteristics are evident in her portraits of Fidel Castro, painted in acrylic or pastel, collages of different materials or charcoal drawings, on paper or canvas. Her marked expressionism, the nervous, spontaneous strokes, the intentional distortion of proportions, the intense expressivity of the hands, the beat of strong emotional impulses, make her paintings—which verge on abstraction—of the Cuban leader a surprising and disquieting experience, unlike the conventional treatment given to the artistic production of Cuban heroes, perhaps with the exception of José Martí, whose image has been object of multiple interpretations. It is an old Castro, extremely thin, sometimes suffering, although still projecting an intense interior energy. Yet, the painter does not use ochres or greys—once again Fiona departs from convention—and chooses warm, strong, vibrant colours, thus establishing unexpected contrasts.

The artist cannot escape from the dilemmas posed by the market: paint what the artist feels, what they need to do, or rather, “simplify” the lines, make the representation less complex to please potential customers who prefer art work more in line with realistic codes, including formats in proportion to the function and spaces they plan for these works of art—larger and more colourful for public spaces; smaller and with more sober colours for a home. My most successful Fidels are white drawings on a black background, with simple lines and which most resemble the real model, but I do not always feel them like this and I also have the right to let myself be carried along by my impulses, my emotions.

Fiona admits that she is headed toward a change in her life, as she has decided to live in the United States for an unknown amount of time.

This creates expectations. On one hand, I will miss the energy and the spontaneity of the Cuban people; on the other hand, I am looking forward to come into contact with a more cosmopolitan environment, with artists from many countries. This will bring about a change in my art and other obsessions will enter into my life.

Fiona Murphy is a graduate of Limerick University where she majored in painting and art history. Her work has been exhibited in Ireland, London, Florence and Brescia (Italy), Fortaleza and Viseu (Brasil), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Quito (Ecuador), and Havana, Matanzas and Varadero (Cuba). She recently took a postgraduate course from Dublin's Limperts Academy of Art and Design.