Born in the then-emerging jungle city of Pucallpa in 1945, Luis (better known as “Lucho”) is an entirely self-taught Amazon art polymath. Drawing, painting, ceramics, embroidery, woodcraft or even cemetery monuments: Lucho has earned his reputation as one of the region’s most versatile and unique artists. 

Born deaf at a time when Peru’s “Selva Central” region was just beginning to urbanize, he spent much of his childhood at the family “chakra” (a rustic country home) and grew up steeped in rural traditions that are now gone or rapidly disappearing. Influenced heavily by the design traditions and mythologies of the indigenous people he grew up around, Lucho knows and transmits a very personal and “vintage” Amazonian vision. His varied and skilled works have been well-known locally for decades. For example, when it was time to make a funerary monument to the 85 people killed in a tragic 1971 plane crash, they tapped Lucho to design and execute the monument (which actually features in the opening scene of Werner Herzog’s “Wings of Hope,” a documentary about the crash’s lone survivor). Thanks to the efforts of fellow Amazon artist, Miguel Vilca Vargas, it’s only recently that areas outside Pucallpa are getting to know the work of this one-of-a-kind Amazon artist.