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...