Background
Claudio Castillo was born on December, 1958 in La Habana, Cuba, and was raised in Europe.
Claudio Castillo was born on December, 1958 in La Habana, Cuba, and was raised in Europe.
It is known that Claudio studied in France and England. In 1977 he had French language studies at Université D’Aix, then studied film production at London International Film School in 1980, and computer animation at Middlesex Polytechnic in 1981.
Claudio has been painting and exhibiting watercolors for over thirty years. Since 1980 he has been involved with computers, animation, video, and films. In 1983 he founded a computer animation software company and production studio in New York. In 1983 - 1985 he was the chairman and president of Antics Enterprise, where he developed business plan, found partners, secured financing, purchased equipment and hired personnel. In 1985-1988 he worked for Xicon Sytems, where he produced and animated commercial and non commercial, promotional, and industrial videos, and demonstrated animation system, co-wrote manual and user interface.
Then he moved to Miami in 1992 and currently works there as an artist, video editor, and animator.Over the last ten years he has been exhibiting his animated work all over the world in major fairs. He has shown and is collected by Museums in China and the US. His watercolor work is animated and composited in real time to create impermanent artwork that is fleeting yet tied to natural cycles such as the moon and tides. He also uses RSS feeds of financial, news and weather data to drive the artwork in real time. He has created custom animated video family portraits.
Quotations:
"In my work, the worlds of painting, animation, and computer programming conspire together in a subtly subversive take on software art. The watercolor image has traditionally existed as a unique original, along with the possibility for reproduction. Software art has often focused on a program generating complex images that mirror the endless variables made possible by computer coding."
"I have found a way to marry these opposing practices by embedding software in dreamlike, poetic watercolor landscapes, creating “non-linear regenerative paintings.” Unlike repetitive video art, these images endlessly evolve in a random progression in which no single composition will ever be precisely repeated at least, not for hundreds of thousands to trillions of years depending upon the number of layers in the painting."
"I want my iconography to resonate as organic matter as well as abstract forms: Water, flowers, rain, sun, vines, grass, roots, sky, rocks are rendered schematically and move subtly toward abstraction. The introduction of multiplicity, chance, and natural cycles into a single image, and its preprogrammed control, opens the work up to a world of puzzling juxtapositions: impermanence / ceaselessness, fine art / technology, original image / duplication / live data."
