September 5, 2025
The other day I came across a drawing of mine from when I was in school (above). Looking at it, I realized I didn’t draw or paint the way many children of that age were supposed to. I remembered, when I saw it, that I was striving for three-dimensionality, for shading and volume. I wanted to paint like the “grown-ups” did.
Now, however, as an adult, I look at my latest work, recently completed (I’ll leave you an image below these lines) and think it looks like a child’s painting.
What has happened in between to continue this evolution, or involution, depending on how you look at it?
I think when I was a child, I wanted to do things well, and doing things well meant doing them the way I’d been told I should, focusing on the role models I had at that age. For me, drawing or painting something in a way that bore the closest possible resemblance to the model was, quite simply, the best one could aspire to in painting.
Over time, I discovered that insinuating is sometimes more beautiful than telling something literally, and so I began to like the painting of the Impressionists, which suggests and requires the eye of the recipient, more than the formal perfection of Ingres, and I also knew that color captivated me and that I wanted to translate the reality I saw into my own emotions.
I continued moving forward and discovered art as a true expression of the soul, which led me to a search for my own pictorial language, which has evolved into the abstract language I have today, dispensing with physical references and stripping away rules that no longer serve me, in a struggle to capture my emotions and my universe.
To paint with the joyful, confident gaze of a child. That’s what I want.
