Dear Sonia,
I have to be honest—One Hundred Years of Solitude never truly captured me when I was 17. I tried again five years ago, knowing the weight of its legacy, its Nobel Prize (the only Nobel Prize in the history of Colombia). But the words felt distant.
Then, in December, something changed. Netflix released the series, and I hesitated, skeptical that I would connect with it. But the moment I began watching, it was as if I had opened a door I was always meant to step through. Suddenly, I wasn’t just watching—I was inside it.
The descriptions of Macondo—the birds singing so loudly they filled the sky with noise, the yellow butterflies flying like dancing, clinging to a man’s shadow, the noisy ants, the flowers falling from the heavens until the city lay buried beneath their weight—wrapped around me, alive and electric, leaving my skin tingling.
What struck me the most was not the story itself, but how García Márquez described nature. He didn’t just write about trees, birds, or insects—he made them magical. He exaggerated in ways that only a few can imagine, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Yes, in Colombia, we have all seen a guayacán tree in bloom, its golden flowers carpeting the ground like a sunlit snowfall. But no one had ever described it as he did—covering an entire city in silence, turning loss into beauty. No one had ever captured the feeling of standing beneath a tree that doesn’t just shed its flowers, but lets them fall like a slow, golden rain. No one had ever given sound to ants, yet in his world, they march with a whisper that consumes everything in their path.
He reversed the senses—a butterfly doesn’t just catch the eye, it takes your breath away. An ant shouldn’t make a sound, yet in his pages, it does. It was as if he rewired reality itself, making the familiar feel entirely new.
I finished watching the series, but Macondo wasn’t done with me. I even started reading the Book, and i am still on it!..this time, it did capture my heart…maybe the moment to enjoy this magical book was today, and i was not prepared at that time..who knows.
“The Concert” – Birds of Macondo
In December, I traveled to Ciénaga, and I saw a tree overflowing of birds. In that moment, I knew—the tree had already decided it would become my next painting. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the rest of my holiday.
I only paint what haunts me, what refuses to let go, what fills my heart and whispers to me even when I try to look away.
As I kept thinking about this majestic tree of birds, I remembered García Márquez’s descriptions of them:
“The concert of so many different birds became so disturbing that Úrsula would plug her ears with beeswax so as not to lose her sense of reality.”
And so, I began The Concert—a painting where each tree did not just stand in silence, but played its own instrument, an orchestra of magical sounds . The tree of hummingbirds played the violin, the tree of ducks echoed like saxophones, the tree of seagulls carried the deep tones of violas, and the swallows—the flutes.
When you look at it, you don’t just see it—you hear it. An orchestra so powerful that it electrifies your skin.
After finishing the painting, I was so in love with the book’s quotes, its descriptions, and García Márquez’s words that I decided to continue drawing inspiration from One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The Yellow Butterflies
So I started painting: The Yellow Butterflies.
There are two magical scenes in One Hundred Years of Solitude that every Colombian remembers, even if they’ve never read the book—the yellow butterflies and the rain of yellow flowers. These images are so deeply woven into our culture that they feel like memories we all share.
I decided to bring both to life on canvas. But instead of letting the flowers fall, I let them take flight—as butterflies. They rose from the Guayacán, a tree that García Márquez never explicitly described, yet I would put my hands in the fire that he saw it.
The Guayacán—the tree that makes us stop, the tree that shines brighter than the sun, the tree that makes people hold their breath.
I knew this painting needed more than a tree—it needed a world. So I began painting the Forest of Macondo, where this golden tree would stand at its heart. But before I could bring the forest to life, I had to paint the Sierra—the mountain range that, in the book, had to be crossed to reach Macondo. And again, I am certain that García Márquez was describing the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta—one of the most majestic mountains in the world, an impenetrable mountain.
For years, I had wanted to paint mountains (I live surrounded by majestic mountains), but I had never found the right way to merge it with barcodes. Fear held me back. But this time, the obsession to capture the Sierra made it a necessity. Suddenly, I knew—the background of this forest had to be the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The mountains had to rise, one after another, so tall and endless that the eye would keep traveling upward, unable to stop. Just as they do in reality.
I dove into research, searching for the endemic orchids of the Sierra. That’s when I found the Odontoglossum nevadense, an orchid that blooms only in this mountain range—delicate and rare. Its flowers look like stars, connected by threads.
So I painted them—not just one, but thousands, hanging from a majestic tree. After that, I let the yellow butterflies rise toward these orchids, drawn to their beauty, dancing around them .
Then, Something Strange Happened.
I was making my final brushstrokes when an ant—the biggest ant I had ever seen in my life—walked across my canvas. I swear, Sonia, I had never seen anything like it. It was three times larger than an arriera (the giant leaf-cutter ants), and 4 times larger than a “cachona” (another variety of big ants that bit me too many times as a child).
It was enormous. Prehistoric. Like something that had walked straight out of García Márquez’s pages.
And in that moment, I laughed.
Because it felt like he had sent it himself. Like he was whispering:
“Don’t forget the red ants that do not allow you to sleep.”
So I painted it, exactly as I saw it—crawling over the canvas, making it look as if a real ant had been caught in the painting itself.
And I smiled.
Because for the first time in years, I felt like a child again. The child who climbed the tallest trees, that chased frogs and butterflies, who sang like birds, and who saw what others didn’t.
But maybe García Márquez was right.
Maybe we don’t invent magic.
Maybe it’s always been there, waiting for someone to see it.
With wonder,
Camila
