Sonnet. Federico García Lorca belongs to The Colour of Poetry, a portfolio published by Galería Juana Mordó and Grupo Quince, consisting of six lithographs dedicated to Rafael Alberti, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Federico García Lorca, Stanley Kunitz, Pablo Neruda and Jorge Guillén. All of them are accompanied by lines by each one of the poets. In this case they come from a Sonnet by García Lorca:

And the wandering water will turn yellow,
As my blood runs in the undergrowth
wet and smelly from the shore.

Guerrero is, along with Esteban Vicente (1903-2001), one of Spain’s most internationally recognised artists, and both were members of the US school of .

After his training in Madrid and his time in Paris and Rome, where he was to meet his future wife, Roxanne Pollock, in 1949 Guerrero moved to New York where the movement was beginning to come together. Guerrero joined the group, and made a name for himself within what was known as

 colour field painting 

a style of abstract painting associated with Abstract Expressionism in which artists work with large fields of colour, endowing their paintings with a mystical aura. Practitioners of colour field painting include Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still.

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In the sixties he returned to Spain, where the scene was ripe to continue experimenting with his vibrant colour painting. His artistic process focused on a study of painting itself, through which he mirrored his own personal experience in the form of colour. As he said in 1988, “colour expands, it never stops.”

For the artist, each colour is an expression of itself, a memory, a lived experience, that lays his works bare, whether oil on canvas or prints.

For him, blue represents childhood, a memory of the bluing used for cleaning clothes that his mother used to make; red meant the ochre colour of the earth in his native Andalucía; and he was truly passionate about black, despite the familiar tragic connotations for the artist who saw his mother dressed in mourning every day after the early death of his father; yellow was the wheat fields, deeply rooted in his own peasant background and his strolls in the countryside; white reminded him of the whitewashed walls of the houses from his childhood; mauve and violet stood for fruit like figs and prickly pears; grey spoke to him of the mountains of his homeland. In consequence, his engagement with colour was vital and energetic, intimate and personal. There was no room for shadows and he seemed to share with the viewer every sensation and every experience he lived through.