2013_10_07_antoniolopez_mercado

"Each student has to see something of interest in the still life and each one will make a different still life, so it has to represent many different nuances". This is what the painter Antonio López said at the Ensanche Market in Pamplona, where he went, together with Juan José Aquerreta, to buy products for the still life that the students of the VIII Painting Workshop: Masters of figuration will be doing this week.

Among the products chosen for the bodegón were, above all, seasonal products: pumpkins weighing up to fifteen kilos, eggplants, grapes, watermelons, cauliflowers, broccoli, red peppers, padron peppers, garlic, veal bones, eggs, pickles, flowers and plants.

During the tour of the different stands, which lasted about an hour, the artist greeted the various citizens who approached him spontaneously and spoke with journalists who came out to meeting. He spoke to them about his most urgent projects, such as the painting of the royal family and other projects related to the human figure.

Asked about the economic crisis and the cuts in culture, Antonio López said that he grew up in an extremely poor and modest cultural world where there was not even talk of a crisis: "We had come out of a war and there were still basic things to be solved, art was hardly talked about".

In this sense, the painter has said that what is really terrible is not the crisis, but the ignorance of the spectator: "That spoils almost everything: cinema, painting, literature... How do you raise the spectator to knowledge? That is the secret of the teaching". And he added: "I think governments really do what they can, maybe they could do more, but they do much more than before (referring to the 40s and 50s)".