From my studio: Evita Medina

Evita Medina is an artist who needs to paint the meaning of her life in morning light, a time of day when the light is clean, pure and free of artifice.

1. ¿Cuándo y por qué empezaste a pintar?Desde muy joven sentía la necesidad de pintarcomo la mejor manera de poder expresar lo que con palabras no podía contar. No existe por tanto un momento, un punto de partida en mi vida en el que me decidiera a coger los pinceles, de alguna manera siempre estuvieron ahí, recorriendo mi mismo camino y siendo la razón de mi existencia. ¿Por qué? Porque el sentido de mi vida necesito pintarlo.

2. What time of day do you prefer for painting? How much time do you devote to painting?
I like painting in morning light, a pure, clean light with no artifice that can change the way I perceive colours.
As for the time I give it, I couldn't measure it in hours… there are days when I run short of hours because I need to let out the feelings and thoughts crowding inside me, and my brushes just fly. Other days, a few calm brushstrokes in barely a couple of hours are enough.

3. Of all the paintings you've done, which is your favourite? Why?
My most treasured painting is Violetas. I could never part with her, because while I was painting it I came to feel such a deep communion that even today, when I look into her eyes, what I see is my own inside. That painting holds moments that marked my life forever, moments when only painting gave me the calm and the stillness I needed then… my spirit felt eased with every brushstroke I gave to my artwork, and little by little she opened up a new path that I'm still walking along.
Her name is Violetas, but she is me.

4. If you could be reincarnated as a master of art, who would you have liked to be?
I would have chosen to be born as Salvador Dalí. His genius let him fly above conventions and social rules, his talent was so vast that his shine reached the other side of the world, he felt so deeply proud of having been born an artist that, far from keeping the painter in him as one more side of his life, he turned it into the whole of it. His love of painting came through in every brushstroke, in every brilliant figure he hid from other people's eyes, only to be discovered if he allowed it… I often wonder how many mysteries still lie hidden beneath his paranoiac-critical method, among the layers of paint that make up his marvellous artworks.

Artworks created masterfully with perfect perspectives that, in many cases, were achieved with a tiny line in some barely noticeable spot of the painting and, in others, without even needing one… a cloud, a ray of sun or a silhouette would show us a horizon as far away as he fancied. His very personal skies with impossible colours, the light flooding all his artworks, his absolute command of chiaroscuro and that halo of fantasy and unreality he soaked his parallel world in made Dalí one of the greatest masters of all time.
A painter above all else, a Spanish genius… of course I would be born again and again as Eugenio Salvador Dalí.

5. What is or are your sources of inspiration?
Inspiration comes to me through my own life… it's my thoughts and above all my feelings, changing with the things that happen around me, that awaken in me the need to tell them. Very often what inspires me is the longing to change a reality I don't like by turning it into a beautiful fantasy, and that leads me to put on my canvases looks, attitudes or atmospheres that usually convey pleasant, beautiful sensations. I also like telling my longings and my dreams, my deepest fears and whatever makes my soul smile… you could say that whatever lives in the passing of my days is my most treasured muse.

6. Of all the art movements, which one has the most influence on your artwork?
Several movements have influenced my work over these years of experimenting, learning and growing as a painter.
Surrealism reached my paintings hand in hand with Salvador Dalí, awakening in me the need to nod to this great master, the creator of artworks that have taught me so much just by looking at them. But in my changing path as a person and an artist, though always faithful to realist figurative painting, several movements have fascinated me and so have guided my brushstrokes through the history of painting. Pre-Raphaelitism, Neoclassicism, the Renaissance, Art Nouveau, Symbolism…

7. What does art mean to you? What role does it play in your life?
The most marvellous form of expression, a gift, a caress from God to a few chosen and privileged people who, all our lives, will have to prove to ourselves that we deserve it… in my life it doesn't just play a role, it is my life in its entirety. For me it stands for the absolute, my first thought when I wake up, my point of light on the horizon that I walk towards among colours, fantasies, dreams and projects… it's why I exist and what I was born for.

Enjoy Evita Medina's artwork here