Axel Amuchástegui (1921 – 2002)

Part of the appeal of Amuchástegui’s art was that being Argentinian, he tended to paint bird species not familiar to me.  But he also did so in a style that was quite incredible. Working, I think, more in coloured inks as well as watercolors, Amuchástegui filled every painted millimeter of his painting with near microscopic detail. He often did vignettes and also painted non-Argentinian species, as well as mammals. Because I came across reproductions of his work while I was still a pre-teen I think of him as a pioneer in a school of “wildlife art” practiced by other artists as well.  A cynical artist-friend of mine called it “refrigerator art”, an obscure reference until he explained it. “Look how you can see every detail inside the open mouth of a jay,” he said of one such painting. There was, he went on to explain, no way that clarity would be visible because of shading, so it was like a light coming on, like in a refrigerator when the door is opened.  Axel Amuchástegui’s art is extremely appealing and marketable, but does not evoke the sense of the species in me, with detail getting in the way of how the subject looks to my own eye, not in the literal sense, but viscerally. In real life shadows, highlights and the sheer limitations of optics and vision obscure many areas of fine detail from us, but in the painted world of artists like Amuchástegui, Lansdowne and many others, that does not happen.