Juan Fernández Álava

Life and painting

Life and painting

A few days ago, watching a report on human evolution, I was impressed again by the paintings of those wonderful deer, horses and bison from Lascaux. They reflect the same intensity of surprise, strangeness and fascination with life as the day they were painted. They are magical paintings. Looking at them, I thought about the strength and ability of painting to convey the awareness of the mystery of living. I feel that there is no purpose more important than that for painting: exalting life.

I painted in solitude. For painting precisely, It is necessary to empty yourself and to fill up with all that lay living inside things, to leave the truth emerge.

We must avoid becoming entangled with the personal inner world, which is very limited and repetitive, and from the silence aspire to be filled with the great inexhaustible mystery that lives in all that exists. The language of painting is able to put all that on the canvas, but it is not an easy process. It requires a lot of presence. It is very rewarding because it connects you with the source of Truth, but not always one is able to find the way. A brushstroke can divert you. A color can transform everything painted into another very different painting. It is a very abstract language that seeks a connection with the real to extol it, to give thanks for its existence. It is impossible to copy reality, and like good jokes, painting should not tell everything.

I started painting my daughters and those of some friends almost since they were born. It is an always new topic because they grow and change from one day to another. I like to see them when they sleep, relaxed or when they are bored  and doing nothing, moments when they pose very natural and end up in unimaginable postures. Later in the workshop I play with these poses and I compose an image trying  to make more versions of that composition to make sure it works. There are also more direct and impulsive paintings, which sprout suddenly in one or two sessions.

I am very interested in the landscape. When I go out to the sea or the mountain I love seeing its greatness, when I watch the animals I want to paint.

I find it very difficult to paint landscapes. Only in some paintings I get that they don´t look like a set . I think I would take longer to live in nature to be able to  reflect it more certainty.

This exhibition brings together some paintings from the last two or three years. figures and painted landscapes that I hope will cause a silent movement in the viewer.

Juan Fernández Álava

October 2019