My childhood was like a Technicolor movie. I was born some summers ago, in a second floor flat of Hostafrancs, a neighborhood in Barcelona. The door of the room where I saw my first light faced my mother’s workshop. Fortunate for us all, she was a skilled dressmaker. My first years passed surrounded by piles of colorful, textured fabrics. Green, blue, yellow, purple, with laces and stripes and patterns, that became showpieces on the most beautiful women in the neighborhood. From that period I have very good memories. Unlike other families, we talked a lot about colors and these colors then traveled from the workshop to the haberdashery and finally to the curving forms of my mother’s customers.

My father was a traveling salesman, and most of our neighbors were black marketers. In that post-war world, the word “art” did not exist. A “gallery” was an enclosure used for hanging laundry, and to paint a picture was no more than making chalk marks on the sidewalk for hopscotch. My grandfather was a sculptor, and although I never met him, I loved to listen to stories about him and always wondered what made him choose sculpture when the world around him was full of construction workers and mechanics. Although the real world around us had nothing to do with art, I could still see and appreciate beauty and because of this, never recall feeling bored or sad. Even winters were just a sort of break between bright summers: the beach, the watermelons, the first breast by the sea; everything happened in summer.

And it was precisely under the strong light of each June, on the 13th, that I would receive a magic present: a box of color pencils that I devoured as if they were chocolate bars. I drew with passion, non-stop. But nobody except for my mother ever thought it was important. They saw my ability as something that did not disturb anyone, but it wasn’t something to be grateful for. In fact, earning a living was doing something else.