8 - DECEMBER - 2003

Even the most ordinary person has something odd about them: Going deeper into Ana Pardo’s life one thing stands out. She holds no exhibitions, yet over the last years she has always entered the open air speed painting competition held on Saint Peter Regalado day. The question is obvious: do you want to win it?

    Entering this competition has nothing to do with showing or displaying my work, I don’t aim to win the competition and if I ever did, I would never win it since its selection criteria have nothing to do with my aesthetic approach and I don’t think I’m the only one to think so. There is something which I like as much as painting;: painting with other people; it’s something I’ve been dreaming of since I read the biographies of the Impressionists. Painting and chatting in the open is pleasant, suggestive, in the clash of a discussion, you become stronger because you have the courage to experiment more often with an unpredictable change, an unsettled brushstroke. For me this competition represents a day when the act of painting puts on party clothes and frees itself of the seriousness that creation presupposes and it is when paintings join the environment, people, children responsibly producing their first works, excited anonymous artists who come out to paint, not after glory but wanting to create something worthwhile .I think true artists are simply creators and their lives are at the disposal of Art without being conditioned by whether or not they are popular or well known in any particular intellectual circle, this is usually dependent on circumstances. In this competition I am motivated by seeing how others approach their work, how each individual takes a different attitude to reach their objectives, how these objectives often come up as they work, I love seeing the contrasts between responsible-faced people who take the day very seriously and those who sit quietly anywhere painting a little watercolour, letting themselves be brushed by that primitive gift which we all have and which since the dawn of humanity has invited us to represent on a surface what is inside u; that basic creative instinct of Homo Habilis and Sapiens is, I think, the vehicle which makes many strangers become brothers on one particular day to go back to the ancestral rite of making something beautiful with their own hands, on this day some people with artistic souls but who didn’t have the opportunity to dedicate themselves to Art let themselves play at what they dreamed of being in their childhood, others play at being the best and I say that not to criticise them but to criticise those who later judge on the basis of completely unknown criteria and mysterious cabals which sometimes cause them to give the first prize for oils to an acrylic etc. but so what! Since it’s a party for us we can let the critics and judges into the party too.

This year I was able to see your creative work and I can honestly say that it was spectacular. You put up two easels, helped your sister with her picture and above all, something that seems straight out of a novel, you completed a commission in situ, and all this in three hours.

That’s right, I have to do it as quickly as possible, since as I just said, it encourages me a lot to observe the other participants and I also have the chance to see anecdotes like this year’s, the personal confrontation that the winner of the oils section played out with his spatula while his wife or companion was dampening with alacrity the acrylics he was working with that morning.
The commission? Most years tourists come up who don’t know the final purpose of the paintings and try to buy them for reasonable prices. This time, a very friendly man came up and asked me to paint him a work with water as its main theme.

I remember, you asked him what setting he wanted, sea, river, lake, and he answered he would love any of them as long as it had water. That was how "the shore of illusion", as you finally titled it, came to be; it could evoke a seaside beach, the bank of a river or lake, as the man wanted.
Of the two works you entered the one which draws our attention most was the Fountain of Fame, a work which was very different from those of other participants who chose the fountain for their work.

In this picture, "the fountain of Fame", I didn’t aim to describe the whole of the fountain, or the trees, or even a concrete corner of a space which is already artistic, the Campo Grande of Valladolid. I wanted to express the typical gesture of people who come to the fountain and, because of its height, look up and find a Neo-classical statue framed by the sky. This varies and here we see most clearly the richness of the artist because the physical fountain doesn’t change but its background (the sky) does and so changes the statue itself. That morning while the paintbrushes were flying my imagination was flying too and for a moment I thought that Oscar Wilde and his Happy Prince were circling round the statue.