How to paint a portrait with acrylics: "Keeper of Knowledge"

Art in Action: Watch My Paintings Come to Life.
Title: KEEPER OF KNOWLEDGE.
Author: Juan Torres.
Technique: Acrylic on canvas.
Year:2025.
Dimensions: 80 X 100 cm.
Edge: 3,5 cm.
Music: Gavin Greenaway/The Lyndhurst Orchestra. Now we are free.


When contemplating this work, I do not simply see a portrait. I see a presence that took shape before me on the canvas, almost of its own will. I titled it "Keeper of Knowledge" because, more than painting a face, I felt I was trying to capture the essence of an ancestral memory.

The gaze of this man is the center of everything. It was the first thing that emerged with clarity: those eyes that look at you directly, with such profound calm and serenity that it could only come from a long life, from having witnessed so much. It is not a sad or happy gaze; it is a gaze that knows.

On his skin you can sense the texture of the earth, of coal, of the primordial clay. Upon that base, both old and dark, the painting bursts forth. Those vibrant touches of yellow, magenta, cyan, and blue are not placed at random. For me, they are the explosion of everything he holds inside. They are the stories, the ideas, the emotions, and the knowledge that emerge from the depths of his spirit. I did not want the color to simply be about him, but to seem to emanate from him.

I wonder what stories he could tell. Perhaps each splash of color is a memory: the yellow of the desert sun in his youth, the pink of a lost love, the deep blue of a starry night in which he understood some secret of the universe. His beard does not seem made of hair, but of particles of crystallized light or sand. The turban that wraps his head is not just fabric, but a crown that gathers those lived experiences.

In the end, I do not feel that I have told his story, but that he has allowed me to love it in his own way. He is the guardian of a knowledge that is not found in books, but one that is carried engraved on the skin and in the soul.