Es · De · En

What Does Painting Mean to Me?

How was my artistic vocation born? Which has been the role of painting in my growing as a person? These and many other questions are the ones I sometimes make myself when reflecting and because they come up in many interviews and dialogues about art and painting.

I support in some of my writings that, first, artists have to be born as such; then, we have to be able to recognize that we are artists; and then, we must learn… And I am going to further develop these first lines of my philosophy on painting.

The art of painting is to me, the art of loving. Without love no sublime feelings can exist; they are the ones which in then end are able to configure the master work with which every painter dreams.

Painting has been very important for me in the course of my life because great part of my life and of my humanistic education has developed around this art. An art  very personal in practice; an art of observation, introspection and meditation, to manage, in that constant learning, to understand all the elements a painter has to make use of: composition, volume, line, colour, matter…

We all know the different ways in which a painter can learn. He can attend training courses, with a master guiding him and sharing his knowledge or other ways to exercise in painting. I decided to follow the path of the search of art in nature and in everything that composes it, by observing everything that exists and happens in our surroundings, learning to look and interiorize all the feelings, so that they are able to exit with all their strength. In that way, the one I call the “painting looker” will appropriate the work and will have his own interpretation according to the feelings he may feel, and so that it is him, and not the painter, the interlocutor with the work of art.

I am sometimes asked about my pictorial style or the trend I may belong to, my trajectory, evolution, etc.

Though I tend to elude these matters, I think that it is necessary, in this society we live in, to label style, trend, for the general knowledge, mainly for Art historians and scholars, so that we can place them in time. In the Spanish literature and in the rest of the world, they tend to “frame” me among the current of the Neoexpressionists.
 
Taking into account the current Spanish painting panorama and how the spectators accept contemporary art, I think that there is currently no defined cultural knowledge in Spain. Today’s global aspect of painting is very confused and the current trend of politicizing everything has also reached art. That could be the cancer wearing it off or finishing with it, because art without total freedom is a dead art, therefore, the real artist must follow its path without being swept by any kind of “trend”.

I would like to finish these thoughts with a sentence which defines my philosophy on painting and art in general:
“Love moves everything; that is why creation without love is only colour without a soul”


Jorge Rando, Malaga, May 2010