Artist Overview
Carlos Velázquez is a painter who divides his time between New York City and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. His work is rooted in exploring relationships among texture, color, and light. For him, painting is an intuitive process – more about interpreting impressions than creating literal representations.
Artistic Journey
At first, Velazquez’s canvases may look abstract, but then the elements—trees, hills, water—gradually come into focus. He builds up areas of bold color on the surface of the canvas to create broad vistas.
Velázquez developed his artistic sensibilities as a child in rural Peru, as a teenager in Mexico City, and later at the University of California, Davis (BFA). In the 1970s, he moved to New York City to study at The Studio School, where he took classes with Nicolas Carone, Mercedes Matter, and George Spaventa.
Currently, Velazquez maintains a studio in the South Bronx and also returns regularly to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where the landscape feeds his imagination. Alongside his practice, he devoted much of his career to mentoring students in New York, guiding them to develop their artistic voices through collaboration and exploration.
“Evidently for Velázquez, the view serves as a visual metaphor of organized space… compositions that only allude to landscape without literally describing it.”
—Helen Harrison, The New York Times
His dual connection to Mexico and New York is reflected in the balance of natural beauty and urban intensity that defines his work.
