Artes Vives

Thank you for your visit to Artes Vives. I hope you enjoy your visit and keep coming back as I post art that I am continuously creating.
My love affair with art began in childhood, both music and painting. Most recently, a growing passion for history and culture, particularly those of the Iberian Peninsula, has enriched my ideas. In painting, it evolved from pencil drawing into ever more complex compositions. Today I enjoy pastels, acrylic and oil painting equally. I have never exhibited my art in galleries, but many of my paintings (mostly pastels) have sold through the internet and to people I know and to friends-of-friends.
I have never had formal training and I claim influence by no artist, famous or not, though I admire the impressionists. The only time I tried to learn formally, I was dismissed after the first class because the lady wanted me to start drawing cubes, apples and ceramic pots and I asked her to refine my aims at painting portraits and human figures...for which she said I had to go somewhere else where they specialized in teaching that. Oh well, such is life...Incredibly, I turned to the sciences as a career and later as a job, and I could never crystalize my dream of formal training in the arts.
I do, however, sneak out of my conventional roles into my little hiding place where all my painting supplies sleep during the regular hours. There, in that little room in the back of my house, I travel the world (real and not) and meet characters, places and ideas out of my natural reach, within my imagination. It is, as if all that had been floating in my mind during the day, would gather together in that room...and each day I go back to that room, I visit friends and places yet to be depicted. Little by little, sometimes working on 10-12 paintings at a time, I revisit their appearance to make sure I am portraying them as they are or as the evolve...or perhaps until I get to know each one well...until I get it right, often taking months to finish each one. During those hours, I paint my mind...whether based on real characters, objects and places of history or created completely in my head, each paper or canvas contains idea, a story or perhaps just a feeling. It is that time - when I am painting - when I consider myself truly free.