Gladys Roldán-de-Moras | Born to Paint

Gladys Roldán-de-Moras reaches into her heritage to create her figurative paintings

By Gussie Fauntleroy

Not long ago, Gladys Roldán-de-Moras was contemplating creating a painting of a bullfighter. She was concerned about how viewers might respond, though, given the growing awareness of animal rights around the world in recent years. Born in Mexico and living in San Antonio, TX, Roldán-de-Moras decided to honor her Spanish heritage by focusing not on the bullfight itself but on a young toreador. Standing alone in a callejón or alleyway leading to the bullring, he leans against a sunlit adobe wall, seemingly lost in thought.

The painting is untitled, with the subtitle TRAJE DE LUCES, or Suit of Lights, as the traditional bullfighter’s costume is known. Roldán-de-Moras wanted to leave room for viewers to fill in the narrative, imagining what his mood or thoughts might be. She submitted the piece to last year’s Night of Artists show and sale at the Briscoe Western Art Museum in San Antonio. It was the jurors’ unanimous pick for Best of Show.

The artist describes the award as a “beautiful surprise,” but just as unexpected were some of the comments from the team of curators who made the selection. Several of them associated the image not just with the Spanish sport but with feelings shared by millions of people around the world in the midst of the pandemic. “They talked about what we’ve been going through with Covid—a sense of isolation, being alone with our thoughts, a fear of going out into the world,” she says. “It’s like there’s a bull out there, and it’s frightening.”

For Roldán-de-Moras, painting is the work of the heart, portraying her heritage through intimate moments of family, friendship, and expressions of the human spirit. So to see her untitled piece as a way of connecting with the larger human family was an added reward. It also underscored her own experience of creating the painting during the pandemic. Because she was unable to travel, she painted it alone in her studio, working from pictures taken by a photographer friend. As is often the case with her art, the original idea for the painting was inspired by music. In this case it was Bizet’s opera Carmen, in which her son, award-winning tenor Rafael Moras, has performed. “Toreador! is one of my favorite songs. It’s the aria I constantly played as I worked on this painting,” she says.

Music has been a central part of Roldán-de-Moras’ life since her childhood in Monterrey, Mexico. “Music elevates my soul, it gets my ideas flowing—especially live music,” she says. As a student, she met her husband when they were both members of the varsity band. He became an engineering professor but is also a musician, composer, and poet. The couple’s three grown children are talented multi-instrumental musicians as well. When they were younger and their mother sat down at the piano to play, they sometimes corrected her mistakes. “So I said, OK, I’m just going to do my art. I’ll stick to what I know how to do best!” she remembers, laughing.

Painting is Roldán-de-Moras’ passion in life, yet it took a number of years and some major detours before she was able to place it front and center. Growing up in a traditional, conservative Mexican family, she was always attracted to art but was told repeatedly by her father, an engineering professor originally from Colombia, that painting was for those without the intellect to do anything else. Gladys had the intellect, and at 16 she followed her father’s direction and was accepted for one of only 35 annual openings in a prestigious Mexican medical school. Hoping for a creative outlet even within medicine, she focused on plastic and reconstructive surgery.

At 21 she married and left medical school but later enrolled in a master’s and doctoral program in biology, believing she needed to continue on the path of her father’s choice. Finally in 1990, after the birth of their first child, her husband encouraged her to do what she had always wanted to do. She signed up for drawing and painting classes at the Coppini Academy of Fine Arts in San Antonio and began taking workshops with a number of acclaimed painters, including Dan Gerhartz. When Gerhartz encouraged her to “paint what you love,” she knew where to turn: to the rich culture and beauty of the world in which she’d grown up. “For this I will always be grateful,” she says.

She reflected in particular on her maternal grandparents. Her grandmother was “an elegant Victorian lady, very dear to me,” she says, who knitted, embroidered, gardened, and had tea with friends when her young granddaughter visited. When Roldán-de-Moras and her husband got engaged, her grandmother pulled out her traditional china poblana dress, which she had hand-embroidered herself, and gave it to Gladys. In her grandfather’s closet she remembers admiring his charro (horseman) boots and clothing. Although he worked in industry, he owned several ranches and was a charro at heart. And he was elected to the Mexican Hall of Fame for promoting charrería, which in 1933 was declared the Mexican national sport. This dangerous athletic equestrian event, for both women and men, provides the artist with endless creative inspiration.

In Monterrey, as in other Mexican cities, the charrería was accompanied by festivities for which the women and girls wore ruffled adelita dresses. Entranced by their beauty then and now, Roldán-de-Moras today appreciates even more both the sport and the time-honored costumes and family ties that are part of it. In her painting ¡QUE DIOS TE ACOMPAÑE! (God Be With You), a mother adjusts her daughter’s competition outfit as the girl prepares to enter her first major charrería. Riding sidesaddle at high speeds, she and her teammates, known as escaramuzas, will perform challenging, synchronized equestrian feats. “I tried to portray a moment, an intimate talk with her daughter,” Roldán-de-Moras says of the painting. “She’s telling her: Now it’s your turn.”

As the artist contemplates her grandmother’s devout Catholicism and her own spirituality, she also finds herself drawn to subjects with an underlying, though not always overt, religious theme. Carrying her traveling paint box, which looks like a large black canvas purse, she sits outside or inside magnificent old stone mission churches, doing oil sketches and making color notes. She considers natural light and beauty, as well as music, to be among God’s gifts, and these are foundational in her art.

Because she continually aims for cultural and visual accuracy, Roldán-de-Moras works from life as much as possible, engaging models and often painting en plein air. In her studio she keeps a collection of colorful turn-of-the-century and contemporary Mexican costumes, Spanish flamenco dresses, musical instruments, and objects for still-life arrangements. Her studio these days is a small house in a north San Antonio neighborhood, conveniently located close to her home. Tall windows provide excellent north light in the large painting space, while another room is home to her art-book library, and the garage serves as a framing station.

As she starts her work each day, the artist likes to glance at the inspirational quotes she keeps in her studio. Among them: Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day that says, I will try again tomorrow. And one that feels especially meaningful to her: With ordinary talent and extraordinary perseverance, all things are possible. “I’m a hard worker,” she says simply. Which means she not only paints every day from at least 8 in the morning until 6 at night, but she also devotes time to teaching and mentoring other painters, including as a board member for the American Women Artists organization. “I had people do that for me, so it’s very important to give back. And the more you give back, the more you receive,” she says.

There was one area of Roldán-de-Moras’ life where, until recently, she believed she had not given back for what she received. Knowing she took one of a few precious spots in medical school and then dropped out, she felt she had let people down. Among those was the school’s founder, an internationally respected physician now retired and living in San Antonio. The memory weighed on her for 30-some years. Then, not long ago, she was invited to a Zoom call with physicians, including one of her painting students. That student, in turn, invited a friend, who happened to be the medical-school founder. “He told me, ‘I’m so happy you left medical school to become the great artist you’ve become,’” she recalls. “That meant so much to me. It gives me closure with that part of my life.”

The experience echoed another moment years earlier, when her chosen path was validated in a wonderfully unexpected way. She had submitted a painting to the American Impressionist Society’s 2013 National Juried Exhibition but was unable to attend the awards ceremony. Alone at home that night, tucked into a book, she got a call telling her she had won Best of Show. Right after that, out of the blue, her father called. It was a year or two before his passing. She told him about the award, knowing his love of impressionist art despite decades of trying to pivot her back toward medicine. “He said he was so proud of me, and that now he realized I was really born to do art,” she says. “I’m very grateful for that.”

representation
InSight Gallery, Fredericksburg, TX; Settlers West Galleries, Tucson, AZ; McLarry Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM; www.roldandemoras.com.

This story appeared in the February/March 2022 issue of Southwest Art magazine.