Amparo Pikarsky
Amparo Pikarsky is a self-taught oil painter whose work centers on portraiture, family life, Hispanic identity, and religious imagery. She began painting seriously after retirement, following careers in theater and corporate writing, and has since produced approximately two hundred paintings across several styles and mediums.
Pikarsky grew up in a Cuban family with differing views about the place of art in a person’s life. Her mother’s family was highly artistic. Several relatives were poets, and her grandfather was a prominent impresario in Havana during the 1940s and 1950s.
As a child, Pikarsky accompanied him to Havana nightclubs while he checked on the performers he managed. The stage appeared glamorous, and performance became one of her earliest creative interests. When she was not observing the nightclub acts, she drew portraits of people she saw on television.
Her father followed a different path. A physician who had risen from rural poverty, he believed his children should understand art, literature, and music but should not depend upon them professionally. Pikarsky summarizes his position simply: culture was something one possessed, not something one produced for a living.
She was also an avid reader and considered writing a worthwhile profession. Pikarsky majored in theater in college and participated in community theater until her late twenties. The need for stable employment eventually led her into corporate communications, where she wrote training materials, industrial film scripts, and marketing copy.
Whenever possible, she illustrated her own printed materials. The drawings brought visual interest to subjects she often found dry, preserving a place for image-making within work governed by practical objectives.
Painting did not become her primary practice until after retirement. Her daughter arrived at her home with oil paints and four small canvases and told her, “Do something.”
Pikarsky returned to the subject she had drawn as a child: the human face.
Her early training had come through private lessons in high school with Sister Judith Ward, who taught her the fundamentals of charcoal, pastel, and watercolor. Pikarsky later taught herself to paint in oils. She reconnected with Sister Ward in her sixties, and the former teacher became an important mentor until her death.
Pikarsky’s formal college exposure to visual art was limited to a single class, taught by an instructor who made chairs from raw meat. She credits the experience, somewhat jokingly, with discouraging her from practicing art seriously for more than forty years.
Once she returned to painting, Pikarsky initially concentrated on realistic oil portraits. She later began working with pointillism, Impressionism, iconography, abstract realism, and watercolor. These shifts generally arise from curiosity, practical circumstances, or a direct challenge.
When her husband became ill, watercolor allowed Pikarsky to work while remaining near him. The medium required fewer supplies and created less disruption than oil painting. A different experiment began when her son challenged her to paint his portrait in pointillism. After completing it, she continued with a pointillist portrait of Stephen Sondheim.
The examples reflect the flexibility of her practice. Medium and style are not fixed commitments. Pikarsky changes them according to the subject, her working conditions, or a technique she wants to understand.
Her major influence is Caravaggio, particularly the luminosity of his paintings. She also follows the work of Cuban artist Cesar Santos and Gibraltar-born British artist Christian Hook. Their approaches to portraiture provide different models for balancing technical control with psychological presence.
Pikarsky’s earliest paintings focused primarily on family and domestic life. She has portrayed birthdays, gatherings, recitals, and other events involving her children, grandson, and husband. More difficult experiences also enter the work, including her husband’s recovery from brain surgery.
These paintings treat the family archive as a record of both celebration and illness. Pikarsky does not separate personal subject matter from broader questions of endurance, care, or memory. The specific event provides the structure through which those experiences are represented.
During the past year and a half, she has also developed a series addressing the experiences of Hispanics in the United States and Cubans in Havana. The works respond to what she sees as the mistreatment of people who sought freedom and opportunity in the United States, as well as the conditions affecting people in her native city.
This series brings a more explicit social position into her practice. Pikarsky uses individual figures and scenes to address political circumstances through personal identification rather than distant observation. The subjects belong to communities with which she shares language, history, and migration experience.
Religious portraiture has become another area of interest. Pikarsky sometimes draws upon traditional iconography while reconsidering how religious figures can be represented within contemporary conditions. Her current work is based on the Assumption of Mary.
She does not want the painting to rely upon conventional images of cherubs or soft clouds. Instead, she is looking for a treatment that can remain credible within the present.
Despite describing herself as someone without a formal studio ritual, Pikarsky maintains a demanding routine. She writes one haiku and makes one sketch every day. Each week, she requires herself to complete or begin at least two portraits and one landscape.
Online artist groups provide prompts when she needs new subjects. The routine is designed to prevent long interruptions because Pikarsky considers inactivity the primary cause of creative blocks. Her solution is straightforward: she continues working.
Portraiture remains the center of the practice. Pikarsky is less interested in conventional prettiness than in the face as a source of narrative. She looks for expressions capable of communicating affection, experience, aspiration, illness, or change.
Her understanding of artistic success has also developed through portraiture. For a period, limited sales led her to question whether the time spent painting was justified. Two encounters changed how she evaluated the work.
A former high school classmate living with pancreatic cancer told Pikarsky that seeing her paintings online brought her joy and encouraged her to begin painting. In another instance, a young boy who encountered Pikarsky’s work in a gallery asked to meet her. She later painted his portrait, and his younger brother subsequently requested one as well.
Neither experience depended upon a sale. Both demonstrated that the work could generate interest, provide encouragement, and introduce another person to art. Pikarsky now places greater value on that response than on commercial performance.
Her writing and painting have recently come together through collaboration. A close friend assembled Pikarsky’s paintings and haiku into a book, an unexpected project that Pikarsky found especially rewarding. They hope to produce another volume combining poetry and images, possibly for children.
The project reconnects several stages of Pikarsky’s career: childhood drawing, theater, professional writing, illustration, and painting. It also extends her longstanding practice of placing words and images beside one another.
Pikarsky’s advice to artists beginning their careers is practical. She encourages them to work consistently, avoid repeatedly questioning their ability, and evaluate their practice by what the work contributes to their lives rather than by income alone.
Her current projects continue along two established lines. The Hispanic experience series remains ongoing, while the painting based on the Assumption of Mary expands her engagement with religious imagery. In both, Pikarsky is using portraiture to connect individual experience with a larger cultural or historical context.
