José Luis Fuentetaja

Venice gondolier mixed media on canvas

c.1990

Is born in Madrid on the 21st july 1951. After attending primary school, he starts to grow an enormous tendency for drawing. At the age of 14 he begins to work in advertising and attends to the Vallecas school of arts. At the age of 14 he travels to Switzerland and in Geneve he gets intensly into painting and decides to dedicate himself only to it. When he returns to Spain he enrolls Arts Studies, and at the begining of summer '66, he visits Sitges, where he'll come back year after year and where ultimately he'll set his home. At this time he starts selling his painting in the flea market in Madrid and later in Sitges, setting himself on the street, thus completing his studies and making it economically. While he's in Madrid he recives lessons by Pedro Mozas at Bellas Artes and starts to learn profoundly about painting. In 1969 he starts painting portraits in the streets. In Sitges he creates, with other friends, a great artistic atmosphere in the Paseo de la Ribera, by the sea, that today still exists. He starts travelling through Europe, visiting and painting in Paris, London and Amsterdam. In the middle of this bohemian epoque, he moves to the Cannary Islands during the winters for 5 years in a row, he moves in the Parque de Santa Catalina "Las Palmas de Gran Canaria" where he works and meet all sorts of people in the streets, which later would mark his pictoric line. He becomes friend with Sidney Nagley in 1969, who organizes his first exhibition in Toronto, Canada. Afterwards he'll leave his studies and start painting exclusively in his studio. He gathers his first exhibition in the Ateneu of Barcelona in 1970. He befriends with the art critic of La Vanguardia, Fernando Gutierrez and the Count of Caralt orders him a set of illustration for a new edition of Garcia Lorcas Romancero Gitano. His first exhibition in a commercial gallery is done in the Majestic Gallery in Barcelona with a gorgeous collection of nudity drawings. He achieves huge success and for some years he affords his painting thanks to those drawings. During a period in Madrid, Mr Ponce de León, a consul in the Ministry of Exterior Affairs grants him with bachelor degree to study in the prestigious Academia de España in Rome. However, he can't accept it due to militar service obligations. Some days later, before joining the ranks he opens in the Cuatre Gats (Palma de Mallorca) with hiperrealist pieces that already then he presented as the first painter in that city, that later would become a fashion in 1973. After this period he meets José Maria Gudiol who advises positively. Since then, the intense work and the fight for daily improvement that has become the trademark of his life.