ARTIST'S STATEMENT or THE STORY OF HOW I STARTED TO PAINT…

I, Clara, recall myself painting since the day I was born. And I remember myself talking. Talking since I was born. Being rather shy for a long time, I mostly talked in my mind. I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped twice around my throat. Almost asphyxiates. My face was dark purple according to my mother Helena. So, I first painted with my Prussian blue face to say 'uf, it is hard to get out of this womb'. I immediately proceed to pee some yellow stuff on my grandmother Maria Pilar's lap as she held me up with a wide smile. She told me about it every 14th of June. A year later my mom reports I was unusually quiet on several occasions: it turn out that I had amused myself by decorating my crib with my own pooh-pooh… It was a lot of work for my mom and dad to clean it up. My mom and dad bought a washing machine. Before, she used to wash all our clothes and sheets and towels by hand with a large green olive oil soap bar. A lot of work. It is normal that she had foregone the sink and bar of soap for a machine. She also had to buy the white with blue dots Dixan powdered soap that came in a large 5 kilos barrel. The new soap had many possibilities: the soap turned light blue when mixed with water and I painted with that paste on the terrace floor. When we watered the plants around the patio, the floor bubbled with my drawings. Downstairs in my grandfather Joan small garden, I scribbled with mud in the hydrangea surrounded staircase that lead to the garage. And when I was 8, in the Pyrenees mountain town of Bagergue, I decorated huge cow dung cakes easily found on the small town roads, graciously dropped by the large animals on their way in and out of the barn. The sun had dried them enough to make a crust that hold sticks, feathers, leaves and different colors tones turning the dropping into a fabulous confection admired by all the farmers in town.
con't......