This text consists of reproductions of some pages from a notebook where painter Débora Arango jotted down information and impressions during her stay in Spain in 1954 and 1955, as well as comments by Colombian curator and artist Santiago Londoño Vélez. Arango’s original notes include addresses, remarks about chromatic combinations for ceramics, and methods for priming canvases and readying stretches. Some of the original notes are not in Arango’s writing, for instance [there is] a list of Smicke colors for frescos with technical specifications that were probably written by one of her teachers or fellow students. There are also notes on philosophy, psychology, and history, as well as summaries of basic geometry concepts. There is even a poem by Arango entitled “Semblanza” [Semblance]. The publication includes both a transcription of the notebook’s text and facsimiles of its pages. 

This text is a tribute to Débora Arango Pérez (1907–2005)—one of the most polemical Colombian artists of the forties and fifties—published in December 2007, just two years after her death. It was included in a commemorative edition of the notebook the artist kept while in Spain (1954–55), and published in Medellín on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth. The chapter containing this text constitutes the core of the publication. 

In 1944, Arango signed the Manifiesto de los Independientes [The Independents’ Manifesto], which declared the independence of Colombian art, especially from Europe. Arango’s opposition to traditional ideas and institutions was well known, as was her work advocating recognition of women in the visual arts.

Curator and artist Santiago Londoño Vélez (b. 1955), who is from the Antioquia region, supervised the book project, which also includes a brief overview of Arango’s life based on a number of conversations with Débora Arango Pérez herself, an analysis of the murals she made in Casablanca (a town near Envigado in her native region of Antioquia), and a series of drawings originally made in this notebook and others. The book also contains a complete timeline of her life. The publication as a whole attests to the importance of this artist for the Antioquia region, discussing the personal and technical concerns crucial to the artist during the time she spent in Spain, where she completed her studies at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. In February 1955, an exhibition of her work was censored by the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.