The Yellow Line

Through the forehead, between the eyes, over the lips, into the throat. Like a column of light split open through a face.

I put it there.

I came to StartArt in a t-shirt with David Bowie’s lightning bolt on it. I work barefoot. My studio is a folding table with a bin liner draped over it, and on it, a small army of Tupperware boxes filled with paint — red, pink, turquoise, the cheerful coral that becomes a cheekbone.

I’m from Madrid. I’ve been painting murals for twenty years. I call myself an illustrator, a little painter. The walls are what matter to me.

I love murals because they let you be part of a community. You offer your point of view to a place. You share your world with the people who pass through it — openly, in the street, in the light.

“The painting doesn’t belong to you anymore. It belongs to whoever looks at it.”

This one is about energy.

Not the kind you measure in watts. The energy that everybody has inside — that you can create for yourself, that you can find inside you. It can be light. It can be love. Every person carries it. Most people haven’t discovered it yet.

I had been carrying the face for a long time. Three metres of it — pink and purple cheekbones, blue across the chin, two calm eyes looking out. And that yellow line running straight down the centre. Like a spine made of dawn. The energy made visible.

What I didn’t have was the wall.

The first thing I did was roll white over black. Slow, patient, almost ceremonial. The wall has to be empty before it can be anything.

For days, it was just colour appearing. A green sketch of an eye. Hot pink at the top. The vertical band of yellow that didn’t yet mean anything.

I didn’t explain. I just kept painting.

Late one afternoon I stepped back.

The face had arrived.

I changed into a clean shirt. I walked back in barefoot, stood in front of my own work, and tilted my head up to look at it.

If you’ve been carrying something inside you that is three metres tall — and you’ve been making it smaller to fit your apartment, your city, your everyday life — there is a wall here. There is the right kind of light. There is the sort of week where the thing you’ve been carrying finally gets to be the size it always was.

I came with the line in my head. I left it on the wall.

StartArt Residency is open to painters, muralists, and creatives of all kinds. Stays from 7 days in Vila Verde, 40 minutes from Porto, surrounded by the forests and rivers of northern Portugal.