Rafael Tufiño: The Oneness of Intensity and Calm that We Want!

Rafael Tufiño, 1922-1980, has been described as embodying the “heart” of Puerto Rico. His feelings about its land and people are in his prints and paintings of harvesting coffee, peeling coconuts, dancing the bomba. In her essay on the artist, Dr. Teresa Tió writes that he created “images full of rhythm and human intensity” that also have “internal order and structure.”

Tufiño, Raphael: Portafolio El caƒé, 1954 (recogedora de café con almud), linocut, image size 14-1/8”x 17-1/4.” Baile de bomba, 1969, oil on canvas, 29” x 40.”

How do we relate our desire for excitement and stir to our desire to take it easy and rest? I was troubled, as people are, by how I could be lazy and then have bursts of energy. In his landmark work of 1955, “Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?, Eli Siegel, the 20th century critic and educator who founded the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, asks:  

“…can both repose and energy be seen in a painting's line and color, plane and volume, surface and depth, detail and composition?—and is the true effect of a good painting on the spectator one that makes at once for repose and energy, calmness and intensity, serenity and stir?

Tufiño’s 1951 linocut, Sugarcane Cutter –Cortador de caña- has a beautiful relation of intensity and calm, serenity and stir that we can learn from, as he depicts the rhythms of earth and the activity of work. 

Tufiño, Rafael, Cortado de caña, 951, linocut print, image size 11 1/2 x 8 1/2 in, El Museo del Barrio, NY

We see two men, their bodies bent toward the earth, cutting sugar cane. Behind them, thick stalks of cane with sharp leaves create a densely compact rhythm of lively short, black and white curves and points. Across the ground beneath their feet, the uncut cane spreads horizontal and low. The machete in the man’s right hand creates a graceful upward curve that is countered and completed by the downward curve of the cane in his left hand. These two curves move our eye up, down and around the composition. In this rhythm from high to low to high, from the earth to man, we feel the dignity of these men.

The artist sees these gracefully sweeping curves as of the same reality that can be hectic and difficult. They’re part of a complex line that is choppy and fluid, starts and stops, moves fast and slow. At the point of the machete, the line descends swiftly to the man’s hand with its tight fist and knuckles. It then abruptly changes direction, curves down the arm, over the shoulders, juts back on an angle, falling downward to the hand holding the cane. 

Every detail is at rest, even as it moves our eye around the composition. We see this in the man’s bare feet placed tenderly and firmly upon the earth. Placed on short opposing diagonals, we feel the motion of his body moving forward and back in the rhythm of his work. As his forward foot stabilizes his body, it also moves our eye into the depth of the print to the man in the distance in bright white, whose diagonal arm leads us back up to the machete.

Growing up in Missouri, while I never saw men cutting cane, I did see farmers working in fields, including my own father. But I was often bored and felt painfully separate from other people. I learned from Aesthetic Realism that the cause of boredom isn’t that the world is dull and uninteresting, but that we get an importance in feeling that nothing is good enough to stir us. Art is the greatest opponent to contempt, “the disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” An artist wants to see reality, not lessen it.

A beautiful detail is that straw hat, with its eternal circular form. Different from how we can go from hectic energy to lethargy, it is a oneness of serenity and motion. A pivotal force in the composition, Tufiño uses this hat to show something deep about the full reality of this unknown man, his energy and thought. This is the effect, the purpose of art itself, which Eli Siegel described as arising from the “being together of repose and energy in the artist’s mind.” Feeling that energy and repose in ourselves can make sense is what every person hopes for, and what art shows is possible.

This article appeared in ArtBeat, the magazine of the Art Educators of New Jersey,
Volume 4, Fall 2012, p. 12