Born and bred in Guanabacoa some 45 years ago, Milton Bernal is a many-faceted man who juggles many artistic hats other than painting: journalism, publicity, photography and design, among other occupations. He’s managed to piece them all altogether harmoniously and prop on them with creative moxie and superb imagination. He takes us aback with paintings that have marked his presence in individual and collective exhibits, both in Cuba and elsewhere around the world.

Based on a research study about cigar markings and band rings –and relying on the artistic movement that swirled around the making of stogies in the past where such topics as aboriginals, Negroes and nude female figures were great sources of inspiration for artists- Milton Bernal set out to somewhat rescue those works of art from a modern and original standpoint, especially everything related to naked femmes. That is, instead of taking nude paintings to cigars, he decides to take cigars to the nudes by sowing the seeds of metaphor through the glamour and pleasure that cigars bring. With that view in mind, he turned to well-known photographer Joaquin Blez Marce (Santiago de Cuba 1886 – Havana 1974), the first Cuban shutterbug ever to take snapshots of nude women from an artistic standpoint.

“I wanted to find inspiration in Joaquin Blez’s works –that are pretty interesting,” says Milton. “But I didn’t want to paint that work, just a nude for the sake of the oleo and the nude, but rather find a way to ingrain it in the tobacco, on a piece of manufactured paper, in order to reinforce the value of the nude image. I paint oleo on manufactured paper and I set tobacco leaves in it. Those tobacco leaves are chemically processed with mucilage and other chemicals to prevent tobacco bugs from popping up and to make the leaves keep their original plasticity and color.”

“By combining those elements from the word go,” he goes on to explain, “in the direction of the cloths or patterns I’m going to paint –just to eventually favor the waves, the plaits or the motifs I want to portray- I make a preliminary drawing on the manufactured paper, I define where the tobacco is going to be, I set it in by pressing it and I roll it over just to make the paper and the leaves melt into one another. Later, I prepare the manufactured paper with the ingrained tobacco leaves, as if it were just a piece of canvass, and finally I paint the oleo on that piece of paper.” Since 2001, he’s taken his works to individual exhibitions in Cuba and Switzerland, as well as to collective expositions in Cuba, France and several Spanish cities.

In that same year, he won the third prize at the First International Yoruba Workshop and the Eighth “Wemilere” Festival of African Roots. In 2002, he nabbed the top prize in the Human Figure Category at the Ninth International Hall of Fine Arts (ACEA) in Spain’s Barcelona. Milton Bernal is a member of the Visual Arts Development Center and of the Promoter and Publicist Association of Cuba.

Female nudes, African-Cuban mythology and portraits are Milton Bernal’s main inspirational sources. His portraits of Che Guevara, Compay Segundo, Chucho Valdes, Alejandro Robaina –that have made the rounds in previous International Habano Festivals- are real standouts.