I taught myself, though at seventeen I enrolled at the school of Fine Arts, where I learned… to clean brushes. I'm a painter and a drawing and painting teacher, although to get here I've had to work at all sorts of jobs to survive. I've been a sign painter, a musician, a receptionist and even a hotel manager, but I never gave up painting because I needed to draw or paint every day or every night. During those years I painted a lot of watercolours, and a lot of pastel portraits, on commission. Besides painting, my great passions are music (I've been a rock singer and guitarist) and literature (I've published a book or two, as well as stories and poems in various magazines).
When and why did you start painting?When I was five, I went to spend two summer months with my aunt in Madrid. Seeing me spend my days drawing in a notebook with my pencils, she bought me a small canvas, a couple of brushes and some tubes of oil paint. That's when I discovered real colour, and since then I've never stopped painting every day. My mother always told me I was born with a brush under my arm.
How do you think a gallery and its artists should help each other?A gallery's job is to make the artists' artworks known and to try to sell them through the best channels, and at the same time the artists should give the gallery the best of themselves.
What advice would you give to artists who are just starting to show their work?Not to be afraid of showing their artworks and not to worry if they don't sell or if they get bad reviews. Making a living from art is hard, but if they are true artists, people, not politicians or trends, will know how to recognise them. They should never give their artworks away. No professional gives their work away. They have a gift that others don't have. As I tell my youngest students: "A painting given away is neither loved nor paid for."
How did you sell your first artwork? Is there one you feel a stronger connection with?My first painting was sold by my mother to a friend of hers, when I was eleven. Then came several more commissions from other friends of hers. They helped me pay for my canvases and my paints, and to teach myself by learning from my mistakes. All my works are my children, but if there's one painting that stands out it's Stairway to heaven, which I painted months after the death of my son Alberto, who died at twenty. That painting was a tear in my soul. In fact I'm about to publish a book with that title, which will include some 75-80 of my artworks, plus stories, poems and so on.
What is art to you? What part does it play in your life? Do you make a living from art?Art to me is life itself. Nobody should live without art in their life. For a painter and a teacher of painters it's everything. I talk to my students about painters, about famous paintings, about difficulties, about joy, about what a well-made artwork does to the soul, about how to achieve the impossible with art. I live from art and for art.
What are your sources of inspiration? Do you identify with any other artist?Nature is my source of inspiration, along with my wife and my children, who I often paint in my pictures. I identify with the painters of French Romanticism, with the Pre-Raphaelites, with Caspar David Friedrich and with the current movement of realist painters, although I do criticise many of the latter for painting only one or two similar subjects and repeating the same theme over and over. I don't like the one-subject painter. As Leonardo said, "the painter must be universal, he must know how to paint all kinds of subjects...".
What is it about your creative process that makes it special?I love the special light of the landscape, when you catch that magical moment of the day and hold it in your memory so that later, starting from ordinary light, you can change what you saw and give it the particular light of that moment. That's why people often tell me my paintings have a "very worked" light.
I also like solitary figures as part of the landscape, the way human beings should be, integrated as one more part of nature. I like to work alone, surrounded by music at full volume. Music is the thing I need to carry me off into my own universe.
Have you had any exhibitions lately, what can you tell us? Do you have any projects in mind?I've taken part in group shows in Paris, Edinburgh, Madrid and elsewhere. Coming up I have one in Valladolid and another with my students' work.
Could you recommend:I can't pick one artwork, one artist, one book… there's a lot I like, but if you ask me to choose: An artist: John Everett Millais, Ingres, Sorolla, Caspar D. Friedrich, etc. An artwork: Ophelia by J. E. Millais. A book: The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. A film: Alien.
Thank you very much.
We invite you to visit Daniel Martín Cea's gallery on Artelista and a review of his work.
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