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The Artist’s Corner with Alejandro Anaya: The Boy Who Built Stories
By Lola Picó
Once again, this corner brings us together with an artist. This time, we enter a world made of stories: men with searching eyes carrying lighthouses on their heads; animals and figures revealing gears and mechanical parts within. There are clocks. Weather vanes. Stains. Lines that seem like scribbles until they come together to form a shadow, a gesture, a face.
I look at them and ask:
—Where do these stories come from, Alejandro?
Alejandro takes us to Torreón, to a boy surrounded by the vastness of the desert who could not stop drawing. Movies revealed other countries, other ways of living; Jules Verne, other worlds.
“If I didn’t like something, I would create it my own way.”
He invented characters with their own personalities, colors, and abilities. He gave each one a story. He drew only for himself.
Nor did he think of becoming an artist. Artist was an enormous word: Dalí, Picasso.
“I just wanted to be someone who drew.”
There was another phrase that stayed with him: “You can’t make a living from art.” Alejandro studied Communications at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Then came film, commercials, consulting, and drawing gradually slipped away.
Until London.
Long before he ever went there, Alejandro had created his own London through movies: rain, dampness, Victorian characters in bowler hats. When he finally arrived, something felt familiar.
“I got there, smelled the air, and thought, ‘I know this place.”
At a museum, surrounded by art, he had an experience he remembers as almost religious. He asked himself, “Why did I leave this behind?” And he made himself a promise: never to stop drawing again. In Florence, a man offered to buy a drawing he was making at a café. Alejandro had no idea what to charge. He didn’t sell it.
Back in Mexico, he took workshops, studied other artists, and experimented with different techniques.
“It’s like going your whole life without eating bread and then discovering a bakery—you want to try every loaf.”
He wanted to try everything: charcoal, ink, printmaking, wood, acrylic, collage. San Miguel de Allende drew him back again and again. Until one day, he stayed. As I listen, one of his works comes back to me. A man. Mechanical parts inside him. A lighthouse on his head. I want to know who he is.
—Who is that man? “The man is me.”
He speaks of alter egos. Different Alejandros appear in his drawings: the traveler, the explorer, the communicator, the wise man.
—And the lighthouse?
“I wish I’d had a lighthouse in my life telling me, ‘This is the way.”
There are weather vanes, too. The wind changes and they turn. He recognizes something of himself in that movement. From the lighthouse and the weather vane, our gaze moves inside his characters: gears, nuts, mechanical parts. “We all have gears, pieces that make us work,” he says. Emotions, experiences, everything we live through. Sometimes, one of his men doesn’t quite express what he wants to communicate.
“Something is itching my eye,” he says—an expression he uses in Spanish when something in the work feels visually off or isn’t communicating what he wants it to say. Then the communicator steps in: “What are you trying to say with this?”
He begins to push the work, bringing in other languages, other techniques.
—And how do you get there?
“By fighting with myself. Yes, I like this, but I want it to coexist with that.”
Geometric forms emerge among his lines. Color enters: yellow, blue, red. The image transforms.In that search, the unexpected also appears.
“The accident—which is a beautiful thing.”
And with it, imperfection.
“The beauty of imperfection.”
For Alejandro, those imperfections reveal the hand behind the work: one that made choices and left its mark. There, in the imperfect, he recognizes something deeply human.
The soul.
The conversation lingers there for a moment. Then Alejandro speaks about time.
“I feel like I lost a lot of time.”
There were other jobs, other paths that pulled him away from drawing. But the promise he made to himself in London—to keep drawing for the rest of his life—is reaffirmed with every work he completes.
“It’s like laying another brick in the life I’m building. This is one more step toward the life I want.”
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