MY VISION AS A PAINTER
My path as a painter is much longer than as a photographer, and finding my own visual identity required many more years and experience.
The usual thing is to focus on a single activity in order to professionalize it. But I’ve spent the past 15 years practicing and developing both photography and painting at the same time.
Most likely, that -and the fact that I was never able to completely break away from the financial dependence on my work as an art teacher- made my progress slower compared to artists specialized in a single discipline.
However, working on both almost equally allowed the learnings from each to nourish one another, providing mutual tools, concepts, and stylistic explorations.
Now settled in Spain and living a new life in my village house in the mountains of Andalusia, I’ve set up my own studio where I develop both disciplines professionally and on equal footing, having found my own artistic voice thanks to this mutual dialogue that has taken years of sustained development.
It took me a long time to realize that my pictorial style -my personal style in painting- was never going to drift far from photography while I was working in both disciplines with almost the same intensity and dedication. When I was finally able to let go of that insecurity that weighs on every artist, looking at my aesthetic intentions and stylistic explorations with more self-indulgence and less critical rigidity or academic pressure, I felt a release as an almost epiphanic manifestation.
There was no need to look any further, the answer was right in front of me: to paint my photographs, to continue developing both passions equally, and to allow them to intertwine and dialogue with one another: to reinterpret photography -which is a manifesto of a more dynamic practice with an objective and testimonial dimension- into oil painting, the result of a more static practice with a more personal and subjective dimension: the work in the studio.
Much of what I’ve learned about composition, framing, and light through photography I’ve applied in painting. And the more learnings there are in each discipline, the more they can contribute to one another.
My painting style can be divided into two dimensions that result in two pictorial needs: on one hand, a more visceral one, rooted in a naturalistic technique with an interest mainly focused on light, volume, and form. This is tied to an academic learning search that connects with the satisfaction of a long-term process of perfecting the technique and the artwork. On the other, a more expressive one, with loose brushstrokes and linked to an impressionist imprint. In this case, satisfaction shows up in present time through the playful interaction between the hand and the tool.
Both ways of relating to the act of painting struggle within me for control. My personal challenge is to find a balance between these two forces, since the growing confidence in the loose impressionist brushstroke is a sign of self-improvement, greater learning, and stronger technical mastery.