It was Fun While it Lasted

70 × 100 cm

his painting was made shortly before I left Spain and moved to France, after many years of trying to build a life as an artist there. Looking at it now, I see it as a kind of farewell. The street is full of movement, colour, humour and absurdity: a woman riding a bicycle in a red dress, children playing, a car on fire, people passing through the scene. Everything seems to be happening at once. There is something joyful about it, but also something precarious. At the time, I was living inside that contradiction. I had spent years trying to make a place for myself as an artist in Spain, and eventually I understood that I had to leave in order to begin again. The painting therefore became, without my fully knowing it at the time, a record of a particular moment — the last chapter of a life I had fought hard to create.