Ramón Piaguaje was born in the Cuyabeno National Park in the Amazon rainforest, Ecuador, in 1962, the son of Cecilio Piaguaje, the Chief of the Secoya Indians. He lives with his wife and four children deep in the rainforest in Secoya territory, close to the Aguarico River. From an early age, he drew the rainforest with his fingers in the sand and later worked with black ink on paper.

In 1993, an American anthropologist, William Vickers, who had been studying the Secoya Indians for many years, spotted him drawing and recognized the quality of his work. He gave him some tubes of oil paints and encouraged him to paint in colour, something which Ramón Piaguaje had been unaware it was possible to do. He spent months experimenting with the colours he had, attempting to replicate the extraordinary range of colours to be found in the trees, flowers, and wildlife around him. Within a year he had developed an astonishing eye and memory for colour.

Following the international judging of the competition at St. James’s Palace in June 1999, John Sheeran, curator of the exhibition Our World in the Year 2000, and one of the competition judges, travelled to Ecuador to meet Ramón Piaguaje to tell him that he was the first prize winner; and to invite him to the exhibition openings in London and New York in 2000, where he would meet privately with HRH The Prince of Wales. John Sheeran journeyed into the Amazon, staying first in the main village of the Secoya Indians and later in Ramón Piaguaje’s home in an isolated setting about 20 miles further into the rainforest.

The following is based on interviews by John Sheeran with the artist.

‘I entered the competition because I wanted to deliver a message to the rest of the world about the importance of keeping this "lung of the world" free from pollution and destruction. I paint what I see and where I live. It is a beautiful, positive, and peaceful way of showing my world. The forest is all we have. I hope that when people see my picture, they do not just look at my art, but realize that it is their obligation to help to preserve the Amazon rainforest. My tribe, the Secoyas, have lived in these forests for thousands of years and to see a tree fall is like seeing a loved one die.

It is important for us to keep our culture and live like Secoyas. We can dress as we used to dress. We are from the forest. It is where we were born. When we are here we are happy. When we are in the forest, we are the forest. When I paint the trees, I am the trees. My name Piaguaje means "descended from the birds". We are where we live. When we go where mixed blood people are, we are empty because it is not our home. We are nothing. We must never forget our ancestral roots. If we do, we will be lost, cut off, and abandoned. So when I paint, I wear my traditional dress, with beads, toucan feathers, and my simple crown made from palm tree fibres. I decorate my face with red paint made from crushed achiote seeds. The signs I paint are special. They show many things – the sun, a butterfly, the bones of a bird. Our forefathers used the same pigment to streak their faces when they went in to battle.

I started to draw when I was a child. I used to sketch the trees and the sky in the air, with the tip of my finger. I wanted to draw the moment of the sky and the time of the trees. I kept these drawings in my mind and my heart and sometimes drew them in the ground. Later when I learnt to draw, I put them on paper. I also liked to draw the animals and birds, and hunting and fishing. It was William Vickers who started me painting. He gave me some oil paints and told me I was going to be a very good painter. I was amazed because I had never seen colour paints and had only made pictures in black and white. I only had colours in my mind. I never imagined you could paint in colour.

We can get white, yellow, red, and black colours from the seeds, roots and trees, which we use to colour our clothes and faces, but it never occurred to me that you could make a painting with colours. So I walked through the forest and chose a tree and looked at it for a long time. I returned to my house and started mixing the oil colours with my fingers on a piece of wood to see if I could copy from my memory the green in a young leaf, then the greens and browns in a dying leaf. I did this many times with different trees, and different skies, and different suns. Later, I went out with paper and paints and started to make small pictures of trees, some of which were far away from my home. I came back and arranged the sheets of paper together and painted the picture on canvas. It sometimes takes me many months to finish a painting. I only do one painting at a time, then I start another one. I cannot concentrate on two or three paintings at the same time, because for each painting I have to memorize all that I see. I have done about 20 oil paintings since I started in 1994.

The painting Eternal Amazon, which I put into the competition, does not show one place. I chose different trees which I remembered and then painted them all together in the picture to make it look like a real place. When I first started to paint I cried because I was so upset by how all this was threatened. But this was good because I wanted to paint how I felt. The trees in the painting have all been carefully chosen. The large one with roots, at the front on the right, is called the ca’co tree. Its fruit is eaten by small animals. It has a dead branch high up on the left, and it is being strangled by a twisting liana. The green leaves with pink tips in the top right, are young, fresh leaves from the quë’yo tree. I love painting them. When the leaves are mature and fully green, they bear fruit, which the parrots eat. You can see a brilliant red pui fern on the ground in the front left. We use this plant for thatching the roofs of our huts. A little higher to its left is a small bushy a’so po’rio tree. This has a very strong wood which we use to dig the soil to plant yucca. To its right are a few bright green drooping three-petal leaves of the cajo tree. We get poison from these leaves to kill bugs. Above them is the coupeneo tree, which has sweet velvet fruit with black seeds and a white inner part which we chew. At the top of the picture, in the middle against the blue sky, is a casë tree with yellow fruits. This gives us a medicine for our chests to give them strength to blow darts long distances through blowpipes.

I usually start painting the sky and the background, working towards the foreground. Once there is depth in the picture, I start to paint the leaves one by one. Each leaf is different. I want to paint the changes in the forest, the beauty of the early morning and the fading of the day, the trees growing and the flowers opening. I want my paintings to make people think about why all this is important and to see what we might all be leaving behind us. We must never forget how this world is. We must never lose its meaning.

I am personally very happy to win the competition. It is like a miracle for the Secoya Indians and it is like a dream to me. Although we are a small community, we will become known all over the world. My painting will have the power to speak. I feel very proud to represent Ecuador, which is my country, and the rainforest, which is a great part of my country. But the Amazon rainforest is everyone’s country. It belongs to the whole world. We all have to protect it.

I have a mixture of emotions about winning because I do not know what I am going to face. All the time until now it was only wishful thinking, but I am looking forward to this new experience.

It is so important for the future of our community. I want to meet The Prince of Wales to tell him about where I live and how it is all changing. He is helping people to understand how important our rivers and trees are. He has been to the Amazon. I have also seen pictures of his own paintings of where he lives. I can see that he is passionate about his world, just as I am. It will be an encounter of two worlds when we meet. The Secoyas are giving The Prince a hammock made out of fibres from the trees here, to make him rest comfortably and to make him remember that we are here in the rainforest.

Ramón Piaguaje was born in 1962 in the Cuyabeno National Park in the Amazon rainforest, Ecuador. He is a Secoya Indian