Gómez Lara is the initiator and promoter of the Saltillo school of watercolorists.
The painter, born in the capital of the Republic, dearly loves this land, which he adopted more than fifty years ago. His series "Saltillo 400", "La Catedral de Santiago" and "Saltillo Romántico" has a double value: aesthetic and historical, as it records the evolution that the city has undergone over time.
“I have wanted to paint our people and in this way communicate with them; for me it is vital and necessary, since they are people who speak the same language, who suffer, enjoy and live within the same philosophy. With watercolor –always a challenge– I can express myself better, without underestimating other techniques ”.
Many decades ago the eyes of a painter and an urban landscape –Alfonso Gómez Lara y Saltillo– had their first encounter, an encounter that has borne fruit in a long relationship resolved in successive series of prints of the city taken from the double fatality of deterioration and transformation. These series of watercolors, already converted into lithographs, multiply by thousands the endearing and emblematic corners of Saltillo. Adopted as signs of identity, the reproductions of Gómez Lara's watercolors are part of the household goods of hundreds of homes, brighten up offices and decorate albums and walls.
An architect by training - one of his important works was the restoration of the Cathedral of Saltillo - and a painter from a very young age, when he looked out over the neighborhoods of La Merced and Candelaria de los Patos, and saw the murals of anonymous artists.
Source: Tips of Aeroméxico No. 31 Coahuila / summer 2004
