LUIS CASTELLANO VEAS, MY FATHER

My father lived an existence which was neither short nor long (he was 77 at his death). He lived under the sign of anonymity respect to his artistic talents as a painter and, also, a musician (he played violin in his youth) working as an accountant until shortly before he died. Above all he was a great loner, and my communication with him was fundamentally based—and I can see this clearly only now, almost thirty years after his passing away—on our common ancestry with artistic roots.

My father was born in La Serena, but even the names of my paternal grandparents are unknown to me. I only know that he was raised by an aunt and that he may have had a mysterious brother that he may never met. We know that  my great grandfather’s name was Antonio Castellano and that he was from Venice, Italy.  We don’t know if it was him or a brother of him, who used to sing in the choir of Venice’s Cathedral, a place that has a remarkable musical history (Frescobaldi, Vivaldi). All information regarding my great grandfather was lost forever in the big earthquake and fire destruction of La Serena in 1906.

My father grew, studied and worked in La Serena and Coquimbo (in the Bank of London of this city) but he also befriended well known artists and poets of that zone, such as Fernando Binvignat, Julio Vicuña and Braulio Arenas, whom he met again in1969  at our house in Santiago, when I was already introduced to many writer circles.  These artistic genes  reached myself and my son Hernán Castellano Olivares, coming from that distant world marked by Arts to its deepest dimension.

His world as an artist was the Impressionism school painting, as we can easily see in the examples shown on this page, the only saved from his watercolor production, now lost forever. His modesty in this sense was total, and it is well known that families generally don’t give a dime to the work that their own relatives create as lonely artists. But I am sure that my artistic pictorial world come from his example and silent teaching.  All that is in our blood and in the Sweet Mystery of Life.

When I went into exile in November, 1973, forced by Chile’s brutal military dictatorship. There my father went to visit me at the Italian embassy’s iron fence  in Miguel Claro street.  There I took refuge to avoid more dangers, after being arrested and tortured by Chilean carabineros searching the University of Chile, looking for political opponents to military rule.  That was the last time I would see him in my life. He passed away in June 1978 from a long illness aggravated by the circumstances created by my exile. This was a long time before exiled persons were permitted to return to their country.

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