"This collector’s piece is the result of the friendship and complicity between the artist Gonzalo Ariza and the editor Benjamín Villegas. Beyond being a luxury edition, it is a challenge for editorial production: that the book becomes another work of the artist, that within it his spirit, his sensitivity, and his very particular vision of the universe are embodied. The Bogotá-born painter Gonzalo Ariza (1912–1995) was—and continues to be—one of the most outstanding artists of nature and the last of the great Colombian landscape painters of the 20th century. His life journey is as remarkable as his work, subtle yet deeply striking: he studied at the School of Fine Arts in Bogotá, and in 1936 traveled to Japan, where he studied lithography, woodcut, and metal engraving at the Tokyo Koto Kogei Gakko, and took watercolor classes in the studio of Tsuguharu Foujita. As he himself stated: “My most important experience was contact with a living culture, where art is not a museum matter but an activity of daily life, an authentic art of the people, present equally in painting, in gardens, in theater, and in the tea ceremony.” Both in technique and in spirituality, he was influenced by the Far East, creating a style of his own that captures the light, the cloudiness, the flora, and the atmosphere of different Colombian regions, yet enveloped in the mysticism of Eastern wisdom. And this jewel of a book captures it from the very fabric-covered case with clasp closures and a landscape imprint; the book itself, whose cover bears a cloud forest landscape and a refined interior design."