Diego Rodriguez-Warner has a cinematic origin story. The son of a guerrilla fighter and an international aid worker, Diego started out his studies in higher education focusing on the darkest parts of human history. He was feeling understandably discouraged by humanity until one fateful night at a jazz club gave him the epiphany to totally change course and dedicate his life to being an artist. In this episode, Diego and Alan discuss their shared love of comics and how it shows up in Diego’s work today, the fear of conforming to the tastes of the mainstream, activist art versus timeless art, and how Diego is able to say he’s never experienced failure in art (spoiler: it’s got nothing to do with luck and everything to do with perspective).

Links mentioned in this episode

Follow Diego on Instagram

Read about Lesbia Vent Dumois (Diego's tutor in Cuba) on Wikipedia

Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack on Spotify

In Search of Duende by Federico García Lorca

The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault 

Learn more about Diego’s exhibition at MCA in 2018

This episode contains mature language and content.