This is a portrait of my father’s father, José Rodríguez Figueroa in the later part of his life. I fashioned the painting after André Derain's Fauvist Period portrait of his friend Henri Matisse (below).
My Abuelo José was born in 1868 in Santiago de Cuba. He was was a Mambi, a veteran of the Cuban War of Independence (1895-98). The Mambises were the Cuban freedom fighters. My Abuelo served as a war correspondent for the newspaper “El Cubano Libre.” The Cuban war hero, General Antonio Maceo, founded the periodical to inform the public of the Mambises’ progress. When America victoriously stepped in with the Buffalo Soldiers, the war became known as the "Spanish American War."
After the war, my Abuelo attended God’s Bible School in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he was ordained a minister. He returned to the Caribbean and charismatically preached the Gospel in Kingston, Jamaica, where he met his Jamaican wife (my Abuela Harriet Bernard) and where three of there five children were born.
