My life would probably be very different today if my father did not have a vast library. I grew up fascinated by the images in his books, particularly the albums of great past and contemporary artists. Perhaps the impulse to draw came after seeing those pictures. Many years would pass before being able to travel outside Ecuador and seeing an original Ernst, a Rembrandt or a Miro, but the printed pictures of their work haunted me even before being able to read the text of the books they were in. I realized in my adolescence that seeing artwork in a book or screen could affect many more people than if those paintings were confined in a gallery. That thought attracted me to illustration, which to me is not about any specific genre, style or market, but about visual ideas that are created with the ultimate purpose of reaching people far away through reproduced copies.

Because of this interest most of my activity so far has been in the field of media arts. The works have been primarily short 3D animated films, multimedia shows, comics for magazines, puppets for political satire and designs for musicians and theater groups

Despite the variety of media, one of the constants of my pursuit has been the use of humor. Once again, much of the discovery of comedy as a tool is a heritage from my father. As a poet, he has a great sense of metaphor and irony that he applies daily in a seemingly effortless manner. He taught me how to use witticisms as means to find comfort from the paradoxes of life. The first practical application of this defense system was against bullies at school. It was great to see that by finding the right nickname or making a nasty but exact caricature you could transform a helpless situation into an advantageous position. Ralph Steadman, the outrageous British cartoonist, said that grotesque imitation is the next best thing to shooting somebody. Probably that is how most satirists start, as a defense and protest against an absurd and hostile environment. Parody transforms pomposity into ridicule and affects even the most powerful figures.

The vehicle for such humor usually is story. Most of my tales happen in fictitious and improbable places or situations. For instance: an Andean town whose inhabitants are rusty machines about to be seduced by the false promises of a video prophet, or an inverse history of the world where the Aztecs conquer Europe and reduce the light skinned natives to slavery. The evident unreality of the scenarios is intentional. For one thing, I prefer to make worlds that justify the effort invested in creating them. Today, real life chronicles are usually better told with cameras than with pencils. To me the strength of drawing and animation lies in their capacity to generate impossible situations. More important, there is power in the creation of worlds that seem very different but are actually metaphors for our own. That is a lesson from the masters of fantastic literature like Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges, or sociological science fiction writers like George Orwell or Stanislaw Lem. Despite how absurd my fables might seem, beneath the surface these fictions deal with some aspect of our conflictive reality. Maybe these narratives are channels to transform inner struggle into something positive.

Each story has a certain medium through which it is told at its best. Usually, when working on the concept for a fiction, there is a progressive revelation if the narrative will work better as animation or as a graphic novel. While crafting the plot there is simultaneous work on the visual development of characters and environments. A big influence in the way I think about the visual design of a project is Dave McKean, a British comic book artist who explores many styles and media. He does not hesitate to combine painting, photography, computer graphics, typography, assemblages and puppets in his comics to convey a specific message.  He is equally resolute in simplifying the visuals to a minimum if he thinks it best suits the overall concept. To achieve this level of versatility is a personal goal.

A great part of the process is devoted to developing the characters. I do studies of every detail: how they look, their body language, their costumes, the spaces they inhabit. At the same time there is an intense production of sketches of different story sequences destined to bring the narration to a visual existence. Once a certain level of assurance in the decision process has been achieved, I start drawing the actual pages of the comic or begin to model the final objects for the animation.

Comics and animations consist of hundreds of images. That means the projects are long and demand enormous patience. In a comic, unlike a painting, each image is not necessarily significant in itself; it may be seen only for an instant, enough time to make the story advance. Therefore each individual picture is not considered a precious object.