Spanish artist, Daniel Lopez, has the ability to work around aspects of the ordinary in ways many won’t. Originally from Andalusia, southern Spain, he moved to Cuenca as a teenager where he began his training as an artist. After enjoying a scholarship to train at the prestigious University of Arts of Havana he moved to Birmingham where he now lives and works. In the last decade, he has exhibited internationally and participated in major art events such as ArtCollection Madrid with award wining projects.
Daniel works with all sort of media depending on the purposes and nature of each project, from ceramic, to watercolour, photography, digital media, and acrylic or oil on canvas. “Each project requires its own language,“ he says.
Thinking The City in a Box...
"The joy of an artist is to discover the unusual in everyday life, reflect on an ordinary object like a box, a window, a manhole, the rain marks on the walls… little things that speak of our surrounding and defines ourselves.
I grew up in a small city in Andalusia (Spain). A very beautiful town with a huge concentration of historical buildings in the old town well preserved and internationally recognised. At the age of thirteen I moved to Cuenca, another beautiful old city also internationally recognised by UNESCO World Heritage Convention which puts loads of money towards restoration and preservation of the historical towns.
When I moved to Cuenca I started to notice something very particular. The old town look more vibrant and new than the new town, it felt like time was somehow inverted.
Then, at the age of twenty three I moved to Havana to carry on with my career at the University of Art of Havana. Getting to know, to walk, to live, to feel that city was a real mind blower.
Moving there from Europe, where there is a policy in place of hiding the rubbish, preserving the heritage like if we where holding the breath. It was a real explosion in my mind in everyday life.
People who visits Cuba has the impression that “it feels like going back in time, the old cars, the architecture, even the life style”. On the contrary, what I discovered was that the past of time was more in every step through the city than in any other place that I knew before.
Then a few years ago, I moved to Birmingham and here I found an incredible movement of a great city shouting to the world that they are here! It was amazing how the city was changing on a daily bases. New buildings coming up, old ones coming down, new tram rail, new circulation system, new, new, new.
However, the past of time was becoming even more evident. Every scene of the city was eclectic and bizarre where decadence and shiny glass towers somehow married each other like if it was a familiar arrangement.
At first I started portraying the changing city through photography and larger paintings on canvas with scenes that were changing in a matter of weeks. Then I started to work with the rain, working in the studio with black ink to then take the paintings outside where the rain and gravity had the last say, erasing and transforming the abstract paintings into something that I didn’t even know before. Soon I realised that I could marry these two Brummies in watercolour, working with the eclectic architecture of the city as I was before and using the water and gravity in the same manner that rain was working on the other paintings. The process became something extraordinary catching the drama that I love of this city. The decadence and the rain marks on the walls, the brick rundown by the rain. The time held in another walk through the city"