From my studio: Francisco Navarro

This week in the From my studio section, we interview Francisco Navarro, a Madrid-born painter living in Murcia who left the legal profession to devote himself entirely to painting. Francisco Navarro tells us he paints "to look for beauty, harmony, the truth of things and of people", and a lot more besides. You can't miss the full interview.

1. When and why did you start painting?
I've drawn and painted since I was very young, but never with the intensity of these last five years. That's when I decided to throw myself into painting, self-taught, pushing music with all its overwhelming technology into the background and giving up practising as a lawyer. I paint to look for beauty, harmony, the truth of things and of people. Sometimes (rarely, compared with the number of artworks I make) I catch a glimpse of them on a canvas stained with colours and shapes. It's very rewarding.
2. What time of day do you prefer for painting? How much time
do you give to painting?
I paint in the mornings, Monday to Friday. Better if there's sun. Although I work with white electric light, it's more comforting to walk into the studio with sun in the sky, not clouds. On grey days I'd stay home. I also shut myself in on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to look at what I did in the morning, take photographs and notes. Few brushstrokes.
3. Of all the paintings you've done, which is your favourite? Why?
When I consider an artwork finished I don't dwell on it much. I always find something that doesn't quite convince me and that I can't manage to resolve. I enjoy myself while I'm painting, and when I put an end to a painting I move quickly on to the next. The question would be this one: which painting did you enjoy painting the most? Almost all of them. There are paintings that excited me more than others while I was with them, taking them here and there, lightening them, darkening them… I could have spent months on them, spacing out the brushstrokes. I don't remember them. But you have to put an end to the painting, and by then I'm already thinking about another one. Knowing how to finish a painting is a mystery only the great ones know how to solve.
4. If you could be reincarnated as a master of art, who would you
have liked to be?
Among the classics, I admire El Greco's work. Among the moderns, Cézanne and Matisse. Contemporary, Lucien Froid. I would have liked to see how they did it. I don't believe in reincarnation.
5. What is or are your sources of inspiration?
Right now, people. Lately I've been painting portraits. I try to get something more than a likeness out of faces. We can be fictions of colour and shapes on a canvas, and yet closer to what we are than in a photograph. The sea always inspires me, the sea in the background. Browsing the Internet I find images that suggest paintings to me, then I work on them with the computer before working them with brushes.
6. Of all the artistic movements, which one has the greatest
influence on your work?
Expressionism and abstraction. Although I'm a figurative painter, most of the time I spend on a painting I'm wandering around in abstraction. Only in the final stretch, after a long, laborious and joyful approach, do I enter figuration.
7. What does art mean to you? What part does it play in your life?
A crucial one. If art weren't possible, reality and matter would be impassable walls for me, empty of meaning. Art is always an interpretation of what I see. There are creators fixated on raw reality, on raw matter. They're cold executants, photographic eyes, they don't want to go any further, they don't interest me. Their works are impersonal and interchangeable. For me art has to go beyond, to build bridges to the future of a possible reality and matter, full and perfect.

Francisco Navarro, many thanks for the interview. If you'd like to see this artist's artworks, you can find them here.