While his formative technical skill was rooted in his study and appreciation of western European Renaissance and Mannerists painters, his time spent living in Baja California also educated him in indigenous peoples art-making techniques and philosophies.
"[4] Carrillo credited Brice with introducing him to the work of the great Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
UCLA instructor Mary Holmes was a supportive influence and lifelong friend of Carrillo and encourage him to pursue a grant to study in Spain.
[7] While studying abroad in Madrid's Círculo de Bellas Artes and at the Prado Museum, he analyzed works by Hieronymus Bosch, Diego Velázquez, El Greco, and other European Renaissance and mannerist painters.
Upon returning to the United States, Carrillo's paintings continued to show his interest in surrealistic spatial construction and are noted for a heightened stillness often associated with Giorgio de Chirico's work.
He was connected to the founding of Oakes and Porter Colleges, and taught at University of California, Santa Cruz for twenty-five years until his death of cardiac arrest in 1997.
[12] Museo Eduardo Carrillo was created posthumously and is the only Artist-Endowed Foundation in the United States devoted to the work of a Mexican American artist.
In front of the church in Dolores, Guanajuato, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla gave a rousing speech to convince the Mexican population to fight against the Spanish colonial government; this led to the beginning of what became Mexico's independence movement.
His gaze is cast downward to the left where a cross symbol can be seen brightly illuminated in pale yellow indicating the movement from darkness to light and his belief in the divinity of this rebellion.
Carrillo's interpretation of the contemporary rebels in their urban environment is shown on the left, whereas a rural scene on the right was set against a field of corn and depicts farmers, gatherers, and indigenous people.
In Las Tropicanas, the imprint of Bosch's use of disjointed and compressed space and the Mannerists use of forced perspective can be seen in Carrillo's composition composed of an amalgamation of subjects intersecting and converging: mythical figures, glowing tattooed figures, nude female figures rendered with naturalistic attention —one splayed on a balcony grasps and points an arrow from a bow — neon-hued skeletons stacked in a pyramid, a UFO that hovers in the upper right, an enormous rainbow-plumed hummingbird, an emerald green spinytail iguana coiled tightly in the center, modern-day buildings with cast-iron railings merged with Mesoamerican pyramids that abut a massive windowless structure detailed in "X" patterns, a menacing feline baring its fangs and poised to attack is threateningly just visible through a balcony trellis, a small Grecian vase is placed strategically at the base of a pillar, a tortoise and orb all co-exist.
In Carrillo's composition, the perspective of the bird is rendered in a scale disproportionate to reality thus making it equivalent to the size of a large section of the night sky.
Carrillo incorporated images derived from Mexico's pre-conquest art that he believed still held aesthetic power for Mexicans and their descendants in the United States.
Their tattoos, scales, and bones glimmer, jewel-like, against flesh and flattened architecture in a scene depicting simultaneous realities of violence, passivity, offerings, power, history, and contemporaneous time in an imaginative invention of space.
In this route, Carrillo saw the potentially transformational nature of this path leading away from a structure that disproportionately incarcerated people of color to the spirit of something inherent to all and transcendent beyond.
Above Indio, a dark cloud that framed a grimacing figure on a diagonal cross was Quetzacoatl: who sacrificed himself to give birth to the Maize God to feed the people.The space was filled with imagery of sacrifice, death, and rebirth.
Carrillo along with his fellow artists Luis Valdez, Judith Baca, and Carmen Lomas Garza were already producing work that dealt with the recovery of identity.
[20] Over forty years later, the Califas Legacy Project continues its work focusing on the art and ideas of our region's Chicano/a/x and Latinx creative leaders, the elders in the movement, and the next generation of artists.