The Portraits and its possibilities

When I came to Holland to live there, I decided to abandon the concept of space and the descriptive painting that I was doing in South America under the tropic of Capricorn. In this way I was able to concentrate my pictorial searches on the form, on the delicacy of Dutch light and the incorporation of the possibilities offered by a digital camera and the computer. First it was a pocket camera, with only about 6 megapixels of resolution and that I had bought to photograph my newborn daughter. The everyday, the interior and especially The Portrait were enough for me to establish the dialogue between the pictorial tradition and the digital age. The first portrait I painted was “Miracle”, a two-meter canvas, the face of a six-month-old baby. Life and wonder, a giant circle filling the canvas was like everything and nothing, the figurative and the abstract. The work surprised London, and was immediately finalist in the BP Portrait Award organized by the National Gallery. Then several portraits followed, and the textures and detail treatments changed as I changed the camera; 10, 15 and 21 megapixels. E.C.