Nicolás Moreno (artist)
[1][2] Despite living in large capital city, he had contact with nature at a very early age traveling with his paternal grandfather who worked as a mule driver.[7] His mural work includes “Los indigenas en la historia” at the Ezequiel A. Chávez School, “Homenaje al Maestro Rural” at the Centro Cultural del México Contemporáneo,[4] and a pair of murals called “El valle de México” was done by Moreno and his son Alejandro Moreno in 1995 for UNAM’s Museo Universitario Contemporaneo del Arte .[2][5] He began teaching landscape painting at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in 1951, organizing traveling exhibition later called “Exposiciones viajeras” for the institution the following year.[9][11] He created works in etching, aquatint and drypoint as well as oils,[6] dedicating most of his artwork to capturing the varying landscapes of the Mexican country side.[1] In 2010, the director of INBA, Teresa Vicencio, awarded Moreno a diploma officially recognizing him as the “heir” of other noted Mexican landscape artists José María Velasco and Dr. Atl as well as the “ambassador of our lands.”[6][12] His work, especially those depicting forests, has elements similar to German Romanticist David Friedrich.[2] Moreno began his career as a landscape artist at a time when the land and the people’s relation to it were promoted as elements of Mexico’s identity.However, Moreno rejected this for the most part especially in his later career preferring more realistic depictions as a witness to natural phenomena, feeling that trying to do more than that was the fall into clichés.[6] He stated once that “With my work I want to make young people understand that their Earth and its expressions are important because it is a way for them to sense themselves, to be proud of who they are and give proper testimony.”[9] Some of his first landscapes were of the Pedregal in San Ángel, with its hardened lava flows.