The Christmas Cafe Crem Competition

I´ve got a new idea!

“Oh dear”, you might think, “Miki is on a roll again!”

Yes, I am, the simple truth being that I can´t live without new ideas…

So here it is:

I am here announcing officially the Christmas Cafe Crem Competition. The rules are quite simple, and there is a big box full of Christmas stuff to win.
For more info and participation, please go to Café Crem, or contact me here...

Darkness in my soul...

Yesterday afternoon we mounted my exhibition in the Eye Clinic. The first painting I put on the wall, in front of the entrance door, was the biggest one, the one from Polop I presented in my last entry (but without the gay flag, of course!).
The reaction came at once:
"It is so dark and so big... don´t you have something else?"

Saying that, his face told such an horror story that if I were not so well-educated, I would have left at once, with all my paintings. Instead of that I humbly hung the painting where he said, on another wall which is most of the time hidden by an open door to another room. The other paintings, luckily, were brighter... although by one of them, the man said:
"I guessed Hamburg..."
and it was featuring a harbour here in Spain... 2 kilometers away from the Eye Clinic location! My fault I guess, as i painted it in northern colours...

I wanted to show you today some photos of the exhibition, But I was so fed-up that I couldn´t do any... and the rest of my day was spoiled! People sometimes are so cruel with us, artists. I don´t even believe they mean to be, and perhaps it´s only me who has such an extremely high sensitivity...

But don´t worry, I´m fine now, and all my energy is back.
I have just started the new "Give me a Title" competition on Planet Goodaboom. Feel free to participate and... there is something to win!
Here is the painting featured in the competition:

The Bulls are fighting Me...

About four years ago, I started making bullfight paintings, not really because I thought it would be a good commercial idea, but just because I have always been fascinated by everything touching "bullfight".
Please, don´t blame me. I hadn´t even learnt to walk as I was taken into a bullfight arena, again and again. Its colours, odours, music, movement, have always been a part of my childhood. I know that it looks different, but I must insist that my love for bullfight doesn´t say anything about my cruelty and so on. I love animals, I care for them, surely more than most of the anti bullfight militants! It´s just that when I am looking at a bullfight, I am in a kind of trance, and I don´t see the bull as a poor, helpless animal, not even as an animal. Much more as a part of a lively piece of art... like the bullfighter himself.

I painted a series of bullfightI, exhibited them, and well, sold them all very soon. Everybody around me told me that i should make more, and I did. I sold them too. Then they started to say that I should specialise in bullfights, and paint nothing else. I started again, but very soon I stopped. I started to feel an extreme boredom, and imagining painting that stuff all my life killed me! I didn´t even exhibit the last ones I had painted.

Just last year I was expressly asked to exhibit some again, and I did. Here, and in Almeria. But I refused to paint any new ones.

The bulls are coming back now, with reunited force! I have been contacted by a company making calendars. They may make a 2008 calendar with my bullfights, 2008 being the year of the bull in the Chinese calendar. A good thing for me, but there are problems with the photos I should provide, I haven´t enough or of good enough quality, as I am not the most disciplined painter in cataloging my paintings...
We will see... I just hope, if it works, that he wont´ make a bullfight painter out of me for the rest of my life! But right now it looks like the bulls are winning the battle. I´m sure that some people will say that I deserve it, having painted so many of these poor suffering animals...