My way of painting

 

Since I was a teen-ager I had always felt a passion for art and now, after so many years, I started practicing with brushes and colors. I also considered the spatula as a very interesting tool, because volumes haunted me and I did some tests of sculpture and modelling with various materials.
In 2007 I started painting again and in 2008 I participated in some contests and two of my works had good critics while their images were printed on important pamphlets. So I really considered the possibility to make painting my new profession.

My first works had nothing to do with bullfighting, but reflect a negative mood. There was a very strong inner conflict in my soul: one part of myself obliged me to refuse bullfighting because the heavy connection with my past prevented me from concentrating in my new life and having an evolution. The other one could not avoid to remember the past emotions. Forgetting meant losing my identity.

 

 

For many days I could do anything good, I spent others pondering or walking or sitting on the bank of a stream to watch the water flowing away.
For over a year I would not go to see bullfighting because it was like strewing salt on a wound. Little by little I realized that taking another way did not mean to forget the old path. My wound began to heal and I approached the bulls again in the new perspective of my canvases.
Perhaps one of my pictures better reflecting this step of appeasing with myself is “La Mujer Matador” ( a kind of self-portrait ) where, through symbolism, I denounce my disapproval and at last I rid myself of all the negativeness which had tortured me for such a long time.

 

 

I can paint different subjects but if I had to classify my works I should refer to cubism, expressionism, symbolism and surrealism. One day I may try more abstract compositions too.
I have several views of things – sometimes I just draw flat forms and scrawls, sometimes I scrupulously dwell upon details...sometimes I paint real things just as they are and sometimes I like distorting them to have a detail or a gesture showed up.
My style can be changeable, yet all my works have a common denominator: when I draw or paint I have never a model in front of me. Dead natures and portraits result boring to me because they create limits.
Reproducing real things just as they are is an exercise of visual patience...while I search to exercise introspective patience.
My works are the products of an idea or an image fixed in my head, but vague, so the job mainly consists in materializing them by using my technical knowledge, and moulding them in order to get a kind of concrete sensation.
Some of my pictures need a very long study until I succeed in having a clear view and defining the forms and applying the final colors.
Some images belong to my subconscious and, as I have no concrete model, it is like threading my way through a labyrinth of which I have no map even if I know that an exit exists.
I often get angry with myself because of my perfectionism; in fact I give limits and impose rules to myself which in most cases are nonsense. Creativity has no precise schemes so I often repeat to myself: “ Eva, the rule is that there are no rules, put it into your pate! “, when I realize I am selflimiting. It is hard to break the barriers of our rationality.
When I cannot give a solution to a picture of mine I sometimes have nightmares and when I finally succeed in finishing it, I feel really satisfied.
When we try to get a definite effect of light we often use unreal colors and shadows...we do not paint what our eyes see, but what our mind wants to see through our pupils. It is like receiving a flattery... we love hearing it even if we know it is not true.
I can paint pictures where curved lines are dominant or only angles and straight lines, but I also like mixing them and create that strange contrast between sweetness and aggressivity. I like using brushes as a caresse or as a whip bu turns...offering hard nougat and chocolate mousse in the same dish... the wounding horn and the cradling “capote”... the caressing “muleta” and the killing sword.