I have always been passionate about art, but I had no money, and with 13 children to feed and educate, being an artist wasn’t an option. I was 83 when I finally enrolled at art school. I was born in Barcelona in 1933, three years before the outbreak of the Spanish civil war. My father was a military aide-de-camp to the president of the republic. When the civil war broke out, he was sent to fight on the Aragon front and then became the army commander in Murcia, south-east Spain. After Franco’s victory in 1939, he was tried by a court martial and executed by firing squad.
The Franco regime confiscated my mother’s property. She had to live with her three children in her mother’s house in Zaragoza. Her two sisters and their children also lived with us. The husband of one of my aunts was killed by the republicans, but despite our divided histories, we were a united family. We never talked about the past, nor was there any sense of bitterness.
I studied mechanical engineering in Barcelona, and worked for a firm in Zaragoza that made door locks for cars. In 1966, I studied management at IESE business school in Barcelona and became an associate professor there in 1968. I’m now an emeritus professor at the school. I have 39 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. With such a big family, it was hard to make ends meet and I had to work all the time.
About 10 years ago, my wife became ill with aggressive Alzheimer’s disease and had to go into a care home. That was when I started to paint.
As someone with an academic background, I wanted to take it seriously and study at a prestigious institution. But when I applied to do art in Barcelona, they tried to persuade me to do art history instead. I said, “No, I want to paint.” It’s a four-year course, but I had to combine it with my work, so it took me seven years. I graduated last year, at the age of 90.
A lot of things had changed since I was last at school and it took a while to find my feet. I never had any problem with my classmates. They were nearly all in their 20s, although at one stage there was a woman in her 60s. They were really easy to get along with. They treated me like I was just another student but also sought my advice, given that I had more experience of life. They helped me out in class, especially as I’m a bit deaf. My only problem was that a couple of teachers in the first year wouldn’t take me seriously.
The first two years we painted flowers, then the third and fourth years flowers, still lifes and landscapes. Then we began abstraction, which is what I enjoy most. Did I discover that I had talent? You know what they say – genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. Sometimes when you paint, you get stuck, but I’m a hard worker and I stick at it.
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Shortly after I enrolled, I made a fool of myself when I asked a classmate if she had a boyfriend. She said, “No, I have a girlfriend.” I learned my lesson and I’ll never make assumptions like that again.
I’ve always loved Spanish painters. I like Francisco de Zurbarán for the way he uses white, and Joaquín Sorolla for his use of light. I never much cared for impressionism; I prefer the fauvists and the way they use colour. I won’t say that money isn’t important, but studying art strengthened my conviction that the transcendent things in life are goodness, truth, beauty and unity. I don’t mind making money, but increasingly those other things matter most to me.
I paint abstracts of landscapes that I know well – always from memory, I never use photographs. I think in colours and like to express my feelings through contrasting colours. Now I generally paint at the weekends and a couple of afternoons a week. When I’m on holiday, I paint for around three hours in the afternoon. I don’t have any plans to exhibit my work. Some of my paintings were in an exhibition in Graus, a small village in the Pyrenees. The work was there for six months, but no one showed any interest in it.
I’m an engineer by training, and have spent more than 50 years at business school and working as a consultant. After this degree, would I say I’m an artist? I don’t know, but at least now I have a piece of paper that says I am.
As told to Stephen Burgen
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