How a Painting Comes to Life in Reverse

The first time Ulises Palomino painted in reverse, he wasn’t trying to invent a technique. He was young, sitting with his paints, running an experiment with no name yet: what happens if you stop worrying about making everything look perfect? “I remember being completely focused on the colors and shapes,” he says. “Instead of painting the way I thought I was supposed to, I started working backward, letting the image come together in a different way.” What began as an accident turned into something exciting — and it stayed with him. “I wasn’t just trying to make a painting,” he says. “I was trying to discover something new — to see what I could create when I trusted my instincts and let the paint lead the way.”

Here is the part that still surprises people the first time it’s explained: in a reverse painting, the order of everything is flipped. An ordinary painter starts with the background and builds forward, adding detail last. Palomino starts with the detail — the tiny highlights, the outlines, the shapes a viewer’s eye will land on first — and only afterward covers them with the larger fields of color that become the background. “The challenge is that once something is painted, you can’t easily go back and change what’s underneath,” he explains. Every finished piece is the result of a process that ran backward the entire way through, front layer to back.

“It’s almost like building a painting from the inside out.”

Working this way changes what has to happen before the brush ever touches the surface. “It makes me slow down and think differently, because I have to build the image from the details first, instead of starting with the background,” Palomino says. He usually carries an idea in his head before he begins — though not every detail is decided in advance. Some pieces start with a light sketch. Others start with nothing but the first stroke, and the painting finds its own way from there.

The stakes of that backward order are real. The hardest mistake in reverse painting is a detail set down too early, or in the wrong place — because unlike an ordinary painting, you can’t simply paint over it once the layers are built back to front. When it happens, Palomino doesn’t panic. Sometimes the wet paint can be carefully lifted before it dries; sometimes the surrounding layers can be adjusted to absorb the accident into the composition. And when a mistake truly can’t be recovered, he lets it become part of the piece. “With reverse painting,” he says, “an accident can become a new idea.”

Ask him to walk through an actual piece and the backward order stops being an idea and starts being a sequence you can follow. Take the cactus landscape currently in the gallery: the very first thing Palomino put down wasn’t the cactus at all — it was the flower, laid in first “to bring life and movement into the painting.” Only after the flower existed did he shape the cactus itself, working in teal to give it form and character. Next came pearl black, built up around and behind the cactus to create depth and make the shapes stand forward. A blonde leaf followed, added for visual interest. And the very last material to touch the glass — the layer that reads, to the finished eye, as the light and air surrounding everything else — was pearl white, brought in to bring the whole landscape into balance. The first brushstroke on the piece is the last thing the eye finds. The last brushstroke is the first thing you see.

Acrylic is the surface that makes this possible, and Palomino is specific about why he loves it. “What I love about acrylic is the depth, clarity, and light it can give a painting,” he says. The glass-smooth front side makes the finished piece feel almost like an object rather than just a painting — a rich, polished glow, a surface that reads clean and contemporary — set against the texture and movement built into the layers underneath. It’s a contrast you can only get by working in the order Palomino works in: glass-smooth on the side the world sees, all the motion hidden one layer behind it. Pieces like this one are part of the current collection at CreativeGateways.com.

“I’ve met very few reverse painters. It’s a unique technique — every artist seems to have their own way of approaching it.”

A piece can take anywhere from a few hours to several days, depending on size, detail, and how the painting develops as it goes — and because it’s built from the front of the glass backward, every stroke has to be considered twice: once for what it is, and once for what it will look like once everything else is painted around it. It’s a small, unusual discipline, practiced by very few people, each of whom seems to have arrived at their own version of it independently.

And Sedona is in the work, whether or not it’s the subject. “Sedona gives my work a kind of energy I don’t find anywhere else,” Palomino says. “The red rocks, the changing light, and the colors of the landscape naturally find their way into what I create. There’s something peaceful and powerful about being surrounded by that beauty — it makes me slow down, look deeper, and let the painting come from a more personal place.”

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