Considerations on painting
 

I passed the years, a very great number of years making drawings of everything I saw. Just drawing with pencil and paper. More exactly and to be honest, I passed all these years trying to learn how to draw this thing so simple and lovely to look at which is a ray of sunlight when it embraces and enhances the forms of an object.

The object is not of very great importance in this business. It is the question of rendering the light itself and it is extremely difficult to draw. Happily, the hope of succeeding is so strong that it justifies all the effort.

I am writing this in my Javea studio, in Spain. At my window, I see the Mediterranean shining through the branches of the trees in the garden.

To one side, hanging on the whitewashed walls of the room, I see the canvases that I have painted recently. They are drying in a pleasant smell of turpentine, tobacco and red wine. Indirectly they embody all the stories that I have just been relating.

When I began this book, I had the intention of talking about the aesthetic laws which guide me more or less. But really these pictures are representative of myself and as my grandmother who was very charming, said "- To avoid being tiresome it is best never to speak of yourself"!

Javea, 1987.