THE GIFT OF THE ARTIST

Some people, few now, still think her Christmas cards and most of the watercolours displayed reveal a fairly well-defined style and technique and the limit of her own skill. How wrong they are!.

The Lady’s watercolours show only how she sketches; her subsequent transformation to oil paintings is sublime. The gift of the artist can be glimpsed in the little impression which the mind models and the hand corrects using the means within its reach, sometimes using some techniques and other times inventing techniques even if this leads her away from the canons imposed by a fashion.

The special character of this work originated in a radio programme she listened to while she was making her Christmas cards: A group of local artists who had one thing in common had got together : they had little time for watercolour. They all saw watercolour as difficult and uninteresting because it requires speed, great control of the brushes and does not have the self-correcting elements of other techniques Ana, smiling, said to herself: -"They still haven’t understood the goal of painting"- and to support this attitude created the next card (a watercolour) with some simple toothpicks.

You can be sure, we were all surprised when we found out that this lyrical work had been produced using just toothpicks: Without treating it as important but pleased by our amazement she just said to us:

"Like everything in the universe around us, the problem is not caused by the element but by our ignorance of it."

MY MAGIC TREE

The next anecdote started with this website, this year. Ana Pardo has received many E-mails since the web emerged. They reflect all shades of opinion and can be divided into two groups: those which praise and respect the work, recognizing that it integrates in a balanced way cognitive and expressive elements ( these are usually from historians, well-read people, experts in composition and colour) and those who reject the work, also respectfully, because it lacks that neurasthenic catharsis which is required of the artist today ( these are usually from experts in criticism and marketing) . Curiously, the small group of senders who lose their composure are usually self-appointed "lords" of painting who do not distinguish the judgements made between the painter and the group that designs the website ( a relatively independent group, with sole responsibility for anything bad to be found in the site).

"... stick to lace-making" joked one of them on viewing the page with the watercolour My Magic Tree. He was so determined to ridicule the painting, it was obvious that he didn’t distinguish Ana Pardo’s dialectic , when the picture is an intellectual reflection and when it is a colourist sketch (that decoration which always pleases the artistic world).

We gave her the printout of this person’s mail (she asked us not just to give her complimentary and congratulatory messages) and she was delighted by the letter. As she read it she replied to it:

- "... how do you know the tree is shaped like that when you realise you’ll never find it?" -
- I know it is even though I’ll never be able to prove it.. -

- "... If someone cuts it down, who will whisper the pictures to you?" -
- It’ll grow back again. -

- "... When you get doddery or you die, what will the tree be like?" -
- The same as today, older…… more magical -

Just then her face lit up and she begged us to print out a copy of the picture (the original was sold) . She immediately divided the photocopy into squares and started to copy it and paint another one the same (just as it will be when she leaves us or gets more ‘doddery’), the same, but older, more magical.

ABILITY LIES IN THE WILL

Ana Pardo was once giving a class in a private house; the best way of learning is to observe a master and this was what happened to a woman who had asked Ana to teach her. This lady’s 9 year old daughter was sitting at the table next to them, trying to dabble a copy of a Chamberlain plate. When the girl stood up and saw Ana’s skill in painting , she complained about her poor resources, pointing to the twelve colours in her school paint box. - << With these paints I’ll never be able to make anything beautiful >> -,  she must have said.
With the mother’s permission, Ana sat down at the table next to the girl, picked up the paint box and asked the girl ‘do you believe in magic?’. When the girl said yes, Ana took the paints, turned to the next page of the notebook and started to paint while she told a story.

When she had done the drawing, she finished the story, picked up the notebook with both hands to show the painting and tried to explain to the girl that colour is a gift given by nature and does not belong to any specific material, we should only respect this element which is offered to us.
The real point of this anecdote is not the final drawing which she copied but the actual tale she told the girl, completely improvised, written a month later and which gave rise to its title.

The respect for colour which should be at work in the artist’s spirit is one of the key concepts that she always transmits to her students. We should see pigments as people, with their strengths and failings, their social preferences, their attitudes towards other pigments, their desire to evolve and create a new future, and above all we should not despise any palette, whatever its element or the number and quality of its material. Although this discourse may seem modern (full of nice-sounding words but lacking content) , whenever Ana Pardo corrects her students she demonstrates the consistency of the title of this chapter. 

One of the corrections that I remember most clearly started with an exercise in watercolours that she got one of her students to do: the student had to make an original composition using a palette with five colours (black, red, yellow, green and an ochre) in order to practise chromatic inventiveness. The student wanted to show off but ended up so lost that he soon gave up the exercise saying he was incapable of improving his work. Of course, it is difficult to correct a watercolour and for teaching purposes it would have been enough to repeat the drawing and offer a chromatic range powerful enough to attract the mind but on this occasion, the rejection provoked by disdain for the result led her to take the work and retouch it, even though it was a watercolour, because as she always teaches, “to create art, the element and the quantity and quality of the material are indifferent , the will gives the ability (the ability lies in the will)”. The result: dreamy.