Totem 4 Sculpture

isabelruizperdiguero (without spaces), is my professional name. As a Spaniard born in Madrid I use both my father and my mother’s family name, so I get to keep them happy. Color and emotion have become the equation at the basis of my work. My inspiration is nature, small things, sensations, the colors that surround us not only on specific objects, but also the color in abstract sense, for example as part of light reflections and its different shades too. Attitudes, feelings, the intangible, the spiritual, humor, happiness and suffering. Since I was a child I’ve felt the need to paint. First my mother gave me a case full of oil paintings and taught me the basics. I used to paint scenes of my childhood, my surroundings, in the most ‘naif’ way. In my first youth I began painting in a nearly obsessive way building fronts, lookouts, balconies and other beautiful and decadent corners where people wouldn’t belong, using a very thorough and hyperrealist technique and devoting to it hundreds of hours which I would balance with my studies. With the perspective you gain with time, I think I didn’t want to look inside of me. I’d rather lurk the exterior from those facades like a ‘voyeur’ worried only about attaining a beautiful image, with no clear references to my being. It was later on, shortly before my first son was born when I did an exhibition called “Papeles Pintados” (Painted Papers) where I gave free rein to all kind of graphics, spots, abstract shapes with pencils, wax crayons, pastels and where I entered the path of discoveries that awaited ahead. When my first child was born, we moved to San Lorenzo de El Escorial, a beautiful mountain village 60km away from Madrid, where I could afford wider studios in contact with nature, share my inquietude with the many other artists of different nationalities that live here and also use their engraving workshops. With no premeditation and the canvas laid on the floor I start the crazy stew, playing, looking without seeing. Sometimes in a calm manner and sometimes like in a spasm, or a spontaneous burst of laughter. While the paint is still fresh I let the colors shift and flow breaking the white, setting invisible ways which, without a doubt, are already predesigned. Just like a seminal fluid that ends up engendering life. With the new day canvas rise, regaining their verticality: everything that was fluid is now solid, everything that moved is now still.