Aguayos I Print

I was born in Abelleira, a Galician village located at the northwest coast of Spain. I have always loved manual work and I have always been a good student. These two things and a deep link to the sea fed an early tendency towards loneliness. Reading and drawing in nature spots occupied a big part of my “free” time as a teenager. In those days, one of my teachers guided me through the first attempts with oil painting. Actually, the after-class lessons with her have been the only art education that I have followed, and I still clean brushes in the way she told me to. As I grew up, science and academy occupied more and more of my time. I studied Physics at Santiago de Compostela and I made a PhD in experimental nuclear physics. I guess I can use an expression that I once heard: “studying Physics until the ultimate consequences”. During those years, research became the number one priority. I shared with some of my colleagues a double scientific-artistic profile. Trips for conferences and experiments were also incredible opportunities for exploring different places around the world, meeting artists of multiple disciplines, visiting museums,… However, any true commitment with a personal art project was complicated. The PhD training was followed by several years of postdoc research in France. A great opportunity and a big challenge, until working conditions became untenable. After several years of precarity, a change of direction seemed unavoidable. This is how I became a science teacher at secondary school. Teaching fits me quite well and it is being an unexpected way of maturing and exploring. Furthermore, it leaves me time for some “important things”, such as art. Holding back the brushes was not easy. My perceptions were forced and unfocused, my hands were clumsy, without memory. Almost by surprise, after a long period of puerile training works, something happened. Exercises became personal, and some kind of style popped out. My paintings were not isolated (and sometimes meaningless) pieces anymore, but a true quest and a learning process where I started to recognize my voice. Besides painting, dance also became a crucial part of my language.There must be a link between the two of them, but I would not know how to explain it. What I can say is that both have strongly contributed to my posture in life: living inside, and trying to keep an axis.