Comments by ios

    Ana Pardo was born in Langenau, Germany; this little village is unknown even among the Germans themselves, yet it marked out this girl for a future impregnated with all aspects of Romanticism. The thickly planted trees of the Black Forest gives this corner of Europe a world of luminous contrasts which emerge between the openings in the grove, saturating each branch and leaf with that mythological breeze which has been turned into so much poetry. Ana María showed an exceptional interest in painting when she was only a few years old. At the age of 7 She moved from Langenau to Gijón (Spain) where she spent 6 years living with her uncles, returning to Langenau some summers. Her mind, full of colourings inspired by the infinite greens filtered through the overgrowth now met a rich range of sea blues and their derivatives. There her cousins began to polish and direct for the first time the wild attitude she brought from Germany. Education became something fundamental for her new sisters, not just a game.
        When she was 13 the world, people, colours and smells of her life changed again. She went to León. Her roots again disappeared. In a boarding school, she met the world of ochres, the dryness and harshness of that climate and also made her first contacts with the world of antiquity. The following year she moved to Valladolid where her parents settled and she completed her secondary and higher education. At the same time she tried to find a teacher or environment which would satisfy her need to learn pictorial techniques and so studied ‘Arts and Crafts’ (where she only learned sculpture) for 2 years and stayed form a short time in a painter’s studio. Due to her stagnation and lack of conviction at the world she saw, which was nothing like her idea, she continued her search for artistic authenticity. It was then that she met J.A. Përez Vigo and this led her to give up theses activities ands follow this teacher. ; her only other study was the classics.
        Ana Pardo absorbed his techniques rapidly but speaking with her you realise that it was not this aspect but her advances in theoretical aspects that she considered important in her relation with the painter. The old professor taught her to see and understand all areas of the world of art and this, as she recognised later, was crucial because, as teachers say, ‘a painter is a well-trained eye’.

     After graduating in History of Art and Archaeology Ana left the academic world ands became deeply absorbed in her private studies. The death of the painter and the meagre contribution that hw university made to her pictorial knowledge shut her up in the same spirit of work she picked up from her teacher and so she fell into the same defect, lack of interest in gaining recognition outside her social circle.

      Even the nomad needs somewhere to rest their nostalgia. Although she does not claim this, Ana Pardo’s life passes like a traveller condemned to wander round the world with no chance to return anywhere. This is not the moment to discuss whether circumstances shape the painter or her paintings fictionalise circumstances but what cannot be argued or questioned in Ana Pardo’s life is that she takes paper and canvas as her native land and only expresses her dreams on them, only finds her roots in them.