Memories and colours

The morning light floods in through the windows of the large studio with its white walls and wooden floors that Andrea Castro has occupied for the past three months. “When I start painting in this place, I am captivated. This studio has changed the way I work. All of a sudden I stop and look around me and say to myself: How beautiful everything is, how lovely, how wonderful! Until after a while I focus and go back to painting.”

Andrea wanted to be an artist ever since she was a little girl. She was happy like that, in her world, imagining things. When she wasn't drawing, she was climbing trees and capturing butterflies which she then released in her bedroom.

At the age of 11, a schoolfriend transmitted the passion for drawing Manga, Japanese comics, to her, turning Andrea into a compulsive reader and collector of this genre. When she was 14 she took lessons with Begoña Riba, where she learned, tested and experimented several techniques for eight years. She also attended the academy of the painter Pascual de Cabo.

“I draw portraits because skin has a load of ranges of colours and is really interesting. The skin has a little bit of blue, of red, of  yellow, some white... I like pictures to have an enigmatic side. They're like memories of something that doesn't exist. Memories of stories that may have happened to someone else.”

Her paintings are expressive and figurative. Now she is focussed on her two latest collections, Floral and Personas extrañas (lit. 'Strange People'), which she has been selling on her website and in interactive art galleries since late 2014. “I make up a story for every picture, rather macabre stories actually." Sometimes I ask myself, “How often might I have passed by a murderer in the street?”

Her series of portraits on which she has intervened the most, with brushstrokes over the faces, is influenced by her admired Francis Bacon, something she admits herself. She has also been inspired by the U.S. artist Winston Chmielinski and the Canadian Erin Loree, with their abstract works and the way in which they use colours.

Before moving into this studio, she created at home, a much smaller space, with the constant fear of staining the floor and walls. “The new space allows me to work on several works at a time and jump from one to another when I feel blocked,” she says.

Her love of comics and Japan have endured in Andrea's restless spirit. Every day she devotes some time to looking at animé series with David, her husband, and in the studio, where she sings as she finds inspiration and paints.

“I have the best job in the world. I can create stories and characters, a combination of what I did as a child with the comics.”

“Depending on the size of the canvas, I may be working on a piece for anything from a morning to an entire month. When somebody buys it, that's when I really feel endorsed.”

“Once I had the most stupid thought: I don't want to work at what I love the most, I said to myself, because if I do I may end up hating it. To which somebody said to me: Right, and I want to live in a big country house with a pool, but since I don't know if I'll like it, I'll stay in my little 60-square-metre flat."

Moral of the story: “You always have to follow your desires, obviously,” says Andrea, as she paints, smiling all the time.