My childhood was like a Technicolor movie. I was born in the summer of 1945, 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 lace 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. |
 1972 |