About the Artist
A career in medicine was something of a detour for Jose F. Caro. As a child, he was transfixed by a family heirloom, a painting made by his great-granduncle, which featured a middle-age woman sitting in a straw chair, her face vacant and expressionless. “It was almost as if she was waiting for an opportunity she had never had,” Caro says. When Caro’s family fled Francoist Spain for South America, the painting made the journey with them, tucked inside a trunk as they sailed across the Atlantic. When it was rediscovered years later, a teenage Caro took it upon himself to repair the damage to the fragile edges where the oil paint had chipped away.
“I knew then what I wanted to become,” he says. “But when I told my father, he said, ‘Study son. You will always have time to paint.’”
Caro listened to his father. He earned a medical degree from the Autonomous University of Madrid and the University of the Republic, Uruguay, and moved to the U.S. with his wife and daughter. He completed his residency at Jefferson Medical College and soon after completed a fellowship in endocrinology and metabolism at the University of Rochester Medical Center, with the help of a grant from the American Diabetes Association.
Since taking his father’s advice, Caro has served as chief of endocrinology and director of the University Diabetes Center at East Carolina University, became the Magee Professor of Medicine and the chairman of the department at Thomas Jefferson University, and served as vice president of Endocrine Research and Clinical Investigation at Eli Lilly.
“It has been a great, 40-year journey,” Caro says, “but I never found time to paint like my father said.”
In 2008, Caro left medicine to pursue his childhood dream. He went back to school to study fine arts and began attending workshops, honing the technical skills required of any artist.
This retirement career has proved no less successful. Caro specializes in pastels and is a signature member of the American Pastel Society. His work—inspired by Marice, his wife of 51 years, as well as their four children and six grandchildren—has been selected for exhibition across the country and earned various awards, including the Award of Merit from the Degas Pastel Society. His art has been described as a statement on the interplay between age-old family dynamics and modern technology.
Caro remains active in the medical community. He is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians. He also serves as honorary director of the Peking Diabetes Center and honorary professor of the Peking University Health Science Center in China. Recently, he served as a member of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases Advisory Council to the President.
But for now, his focus remains art. This interest, first sparked by the talent of a long-dead relative, will now live on in a third generation. Caro’s youngest son, Rafael—named for that same great-granduncle—is now pursuing his own career as an artist.
“If I end up painting like my uncle and my son,” Caro says, “I would say it is not a bad way to end.”
On the Cover: Maternity
Maternity (pastel on sanded paper) was accepted for the 10th annual Northeast National Pastel Exhibition and received the Outstanding Portrait Award. It was also selected for the 2014 Degas Pastel Society Fifteenth Biennial National Exhibition. Like many of his other paintings, including Choices, Social Isolation, and The Birthday Party, Maternity explores modern themes of togetherness. Relationships—in this case, a mother and daughter—are proximate and rich, even as the individuals direct their attention to different devices. Caro uses the unique glow of digital screens to light his subjects separately, creating a pall that might be isolating were it not for the embrace of the mother.
