Remedios Varo (1908-1963) was a Spanish-born Surrealist painter who fled Paris for Mexico City in 1941 and spent the last years of her life painting meticulous worlds of alchemists, towers and machines. She is best known for Creation of the Birds, in which an owl-faced woman paints birds to life, and she has been a cult figure in Mexico since the 1950s.
For years she earned her living with commercial work. She had only about eight years left when she began to paint the pictures that made her famous.
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She stands at the center of the canvas with the face of an owl, holding a prism through which moonlight enters. The light passes through a container and turns into three colors. With those colors she paints birds, and the birds come to life and fly away.
Every part of the scene looks as if it could be built, and the habit has an unglamorous origin. Before she painted this, Varo spent years drawing mosquitoes and illustrating pamphlets for the pharmaceutical company Bayer.
She did not put her own name on that work. She signed it with another one, and she kept her own for the paintings she had not yet made.
What You'll Discover
Who taught her to draw like this.
Who the three witches were.
Whose name she signed ads with.
What the owl-woman is really doing.
What she wrote in her notebooks.
Where her paintings hang today.