The Family Album

Things are not as simple as they appear to be" the artist explains. His unexpected win in the E. Leon Jimenes in 1968 would inspire him to free his imagination.

"When I would visit the homes of the well-to-do in Puerto Plata, I would notice that all of them had photo albums of their trips and social events, with people posing." In his boyhood home, however, and in those of his schoolmates and neighbors in the barrios of the what would later be known as the Malecon, no one had these albums. "If anyone had a photograph, it was hanging on a wall or in a frame."

The remembrance of those albums, nevertheless, would serve as inspiration for Severino to create his own family album in a successful series of paintings that followed that first award.

"One does not work on a painting without a goal," he explained. "I decided to paint my family album and create my ancestors." And thus he created his aunt, the countess and many other noble-birth ancestors, all sheer fantasy and all black Severino noted, however, that his friends were only painting white people, and speculated that perhaps it was because their professors were all Spaniards. "If I was black, there was no reason for my subjects to be white," he commented. Severino

was a grandchild of one of those anonymous emigrants from Tortola or St Thomas who worked on the Victorian houses of the city.

"So I started to order my family. It was an original, the intimism of a man from Puerto Plata. It would become a long series."

After completing his family album he would not paint a man again, from then becoming a flag-bearer for the internal struggles of women to escape poverty and marginalization.

Amantina Villalona

Severino's work would soon fall under a heavy influence of symbolism as a way to express his disdain for violations to civil liberties and human rights, which in those days were being strongly questioned.

An unfortunate event would spawn an important series of paintings for the artist, whose sensibilities were shaken by the suicide of a 13-year-old girl in 1974. Amantina Villalona took her own life in San Cristobal and her death was reported in a story in the El Nacional newspaper, which would later spark the unusual series. The artist would always paint the child wearing her birthday dress, accompanied by her doll.

As an exception to his proclivity for only painting black women, Amantina Villalona was white. "I blamed all of Dominican society, the Church, the military, Balaguer and myself for the situation," he said. "Life, Passion and Death of Amantina Villalona," won him the Grand Prize of the Bellas Artes Bienal and subsequently a Special Mention in the Tri-annual Engravings Prix held in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Brides for Ogun

Among Severino's most lauded creations, Brides for Ogun is a series of religious paintings that also denote protest Through these canvasses he tells the tragic stories of the women of his youth. The woman that I met was a prisoner in her home. As a child she was brought up at home, while the boys were sent out to roam the streets freely. But the little girl could only go out when accompanied. I painted her for myself, feeling that she dreamed of being free. The only way to leave home was by marriage. The tragic part of the