About

ABOUT — Omar Asprilla

For more than forty years I have been investigating a single question — not how to make paintings, but how we learn to see. My abstract paintings are where that investigation happens: they explore how intention, matter, time, and attention shape both the work and the person who makes it.

I was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and immigrated to New York City at seventeen. My education as a painter did not follow a conventional path. It was shaped as much by lived experience as by formal study — and by thousands of hours spent looking before I fully understood what I was seeing.

For years I worked inside four of New York's great museums: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the International Center of Photography. Those years became an education no classroom could provide. Each day I stood in the presence of works made across centuries and cultures, returning to the same paintings again and again until I understood that looking is not a passive act. It is a discipline. Long before I had language for my ideas, the museums taught me how sustained attention can transform the way we see.

Later I studied philosophy at Stony Brook University, under Hugh J. Silverman. Philosophy did not teach me how to paint; it gave me words for questions that had already emerged through years in the museums and decades in the studio. Painting has always been the origin of my thinking; philosophy became another way of reflecting on what painting had already revealed. In time, that reflection became a book — Learning to See: A Memoir of Painting, Philosophy, and Attention — the story of how a life of looking and making slowly became a way of understanding.

For more than forty years the studio has been the center of my life. I begin each painting with intention — decisions about scale, proportion, color, and surface. But once paint meets the canvas, another process begins. Gravity, moisture, pigment, and time become active participants; the surface cracks, settles, and shifts in ways I do not fully control. Rather than eliminate these forces, I have learned to work with them. Each painting becomes an investigation rather than the execution of a predetermined image. I have made more than three hundred of them, and each still teaches me something I could not have known before I began.

The purpose of painting, I came to understand, is not to confirm what I already know but to discover what I could not have known before I started. Observation became as important as action; patience as important as intention; looking as important as making.

I often examine my painted surfaces under magnification, where pigment migration, minute fractures, and layered sediments reveal transformations invisible to the eye. They remind me that a painting keeps evolving long after it appears finished — that time itself is one of painting's essential materials.

As an Afro-Colombian American artist, my life has been shaped by migration, history, memory, and inheritance. These experiences inform the work, but I do not paint to illustrate autobiography. I hope instead that the paintings invite reflection on larger questions: How does uncertainty become form? What can matter teach us that ideas alone cannot? How does sustained attention change the way we understand the world?

People sometimes ask why I still paint after so many years. The answer has never changed: I continue because painting continues to surprise me. As long as that remains true, I will keep returning to the studio.

I live and work in Dallas, Texas. Painting, for me, is more than a way of making images. It is a disciplined way of thinking, observing, and discovering.

Welcome. I hope you will spend time with the work.