Panama's garden of earthly delights.

• Author: Bianco, Adriana

As a child, Al Sprague watched the ships pass through the locks of the Panama Canal, and the surrounding tropical jungle was a part of his daily landscape. "I was born in Colon," he says, "then, because of my father's job we went to live in the Canal Zone. I remember the magnificent landscape, and the impression the enormous ships made on me as they entered the Miraflores lock."

Born in 1948 in this unique place, an intersection of roadways and waterways, center of the transatlantic world, natural isthmus surrounded by lush green, tropical jungle, Sprague loves Panama and translates this love onto his canvases. His oil painting Golden Passage recaptures his childhood years, both his awe at the Canal's structure and amazement of the ships that traveled through it.

Sprague shares two countries; he lives part of the year in Virginia in the United States, where he went to college, studying free arts at American University, in Washington, D.C., and the rest of the year in Panama. It was when he returned to Panama, he says, that "I began to paint its people, the fishermen, the dancers, the street vendors, the jungle, the color, the rhythm of my country. I wanted to imprint those images on my canvases."

Sprague's Fishermen Series features those men who live along the banks of the river and the sea, those men of the water that surrounds Panama. Oddly, the name "Panama" in the indigenous language means abundance of fish, butterflies, and birds. Sprague immerses himself in that beauty, that simplicity, and tropical laxity. What do the fishermen catch in paintings like Early Morning Net Men or Pulling in the Nets? Just the variety of fish that are native to Panama, like bonito, tuna, swordfish, and gilt.

"I love to fish," confesses Sprague, who knows that Panama is the world capital of black marlin, that 480 rivers slice through the country, that it is surrounded by more than fifteen hundred islands and cays, and that its marine coasts total nearly two thousand miles. In its uneven terrain, Panama is a country of water, and water is its vital symbol, its inspiration of stories and legends that originate from popular indigenous tradition.

Other paintings, like Panama Jungle and Rainforest, look inward, but the artist does not err when he describes the vegetative exuberance of Panama. Immersed in a neotropical empire of flora and fauna, Panama is an eternal garden: acacias, poincianas bougainvilleas, jacaranda, and orchids spill their color amid the...