My Recent Painting Exhibition Woke Me Up
I have lived in the same old stone house on a rocky mountainside above a village outside Granada for fifty years. For forty of them I have worked in the same studio which sits on a terrace beneath the house. My artwork in the early days was limited to painting. The printmaking came later, in the late 70s, after I was selected to participate in the printmaking program that master printmaker, José García Lomas (Pepe Lomas) was running for the Rodríguez-Acosta Foundation in Granada. I worked there, under his guidance for almost three years. Pepe’s great merit was that he didn’t tell his students what to do. He helped them do it.
When the Foundation closed in 1980, I bought one of the etching presses and enough tables, equipment and materials to set up a print workshop in my studio. (I still use some of those inks. They had wonderful quality in those days.) I had 50 square meters of space in the studio, ample for installing a printmaking workshop, but it didn’t leave much room for painting. Along with that hindrance, my printmaking courses quickly gained popularity with artists from around the world. My husband, Mike, insisted on making me a website for my workshops. I thought that was ridiculous(!) but he went ahead with it and it started to function. Before long I had neither the space, the time, nor the disposition for painting. But I always missed it sorely. It only took me 40 years to get back to paint in a serious way. It was in a three-month period before of my recent exhibition. That mini-retrospective reignited my passion for paint.
It was a time when I didn’t have any printmaking students, time all to myself. I took advantage to reserve the big exhibit space on the top floor of our town hall. Our mayor is an art lover, always willing to collaborate. He’s even talking about building a municipal art museum. That would be quite a feat in a village of 1,400 people. The mayor was delighted because the show would coincide with our village’s annual cultural week. Once I had secured the dates—virtually the whole month of August—I got to work on a few paintings that needed finishing. In three months I did that and also produced two more large paintings.
I was delighted with myself. Painting had never seemed so natural. I went to visit the gallery space and found it too big for the amount of work I had, so I talked with Juan Vida, a painter friend of ours who came to live in our village about 25 years ago, and proposed that we exhibit together. I am convinced that our two approaches to oil painting complemented each other and made for a more interesting exposition. The show attracted a rich mix of people, both villagers and outsiders. I didn’t expect to see so many of our neighbors nor the level of their enthusiasm for art. I found that surprise uplifting.
It’s only an eight-kilometer (five-mile) drive from Granada to our village and a lot of Granadinos came out to see the show. Juan Vida’s presence attracted a lot of them. He’s a well-known painter in Granada and further afield. We also got a big boost when Antonio Arenas, a reporter from Ideal, one of the Granada local papers, came out to cover the show and produced a big piece on it which included an interview with me in text and video, along with clippings from previous events. Without Antonio’s help, we wouldn’t have had so many visitors. (He had a big morning in our village. Here are some links to his report, in Spanish, though the images are images: https://bit.ly/30HQ7FE, this one to the exhibition, https://bit.ly/3YLA26i, this one to my illustrated cookery book.
As the exhibition advanced, a couple of old friends cornered me and said, “Maureen, you look great. We really love your new work. How do you do it?” I feel better because I’m painting again. After 40 years dedicated almost exclusively to printmaking, I finally got a few months free. In theory, I don’t do print workshops any more, but people keep turning up for one-on-one coaching, and I have trouble saying no. During my printmaking career, when I did occasionally go into the studio to paint, I could not get inspired. It seemed that my painting days were over. That changed thanks to last month’s exhibition of paintings that I never gotten around to exhibiting before, plus the new ones, which met with a warm welcome.
I realized in the run-up to the exhibition that I needed to finish some of the paintings for the show—work from 1984-2023. I was lucky that I didn’t have any artists coming for printmaking courses till late autumn. So I was free to get to work. I soon re-discovered that I knew how to paint—and how much I enjoyed it. After all that time hardly touching paint on canvas it felt as if I was painting better than ever. Also, I realized that the work I had done in printmaking over the years had refined my approach to painting, which seems easier now. At bottom, there’s not so much difference between painting and printmaking. It’s all about the image.
Tending the show for two hours, mornings and evenings, was a lot of work, but Mike drove me down and back twice every day. The town hall is only about a kilometer away from our house, but it is downhill, which after a long day’s work becomes uphill. With time on my hands, I put together an improvised visitors’ book and encouraged people to write their impressions of the show in it. That revealed some delightful surprises. Some of our village neighbors actually painted themselves. And the children were surprisingly insightful. They almost always chose the best paintings and wrote thoughtful comments in the visitors’ book, observations that were relevant and sincere. It made me proud of them. My pueblo inspired me.
I also got advice and encouragement from Juan Vida, who created the sweet little catalogue and the posters. Juan has exhibited more than I have and he was generous with his advice. He edited the number of paintings I should hang and helped with hanging them. The friendship we had shared from our days of anti-Franco activism was revitalized, something wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for exhibiting together.
I closed the gallery doors every night at 10:00, the perfect hour on those hot August nights, to stroll with a small group of old and new friends, the 50 meters from the town hall to La Carretilla Restaurant, run by Musa Hachemi, the cordial Algerian owner, whose son is the poet and translator, Munir Hachemi, who has won international prizes for both. The menu at La Carretilla has just enough creativity and exoticism to keep you going back. We went back night after night, sometimes for a couple of drinks and tapas, sometimes for a full supper. I found that wonderful “being together with people” refreshing after the isolation of the Covid years and their aftermath.
That realization affected my relations with people. I hadn’t noticed how much the Covid restrictions had restricted my contact and communication with my friends. I had become a virtual recluse. I had forgotten how delightful friends were—and how necessary. Those suppers by the riverside were essential in my personal renovation. It was there that I realized I was onto something important. In the end, after a month of attending the exhibition, I have made lots of new friends and re-connected with old ones. I sold a couple of paintings and got a couple of commissions, one of them from a lady who loved the rendering of cats in one of my paintings and commissioned me to paint hers. Best of all, the show, in all its aspects, awakened my awareness and my creativity. I feel younger. I’m 84 years old and I feel 35. It feels as if I’m starting afresh as a painter.
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Printmaking Courses in Spain 