Teresa G. Justo
Teresa García Justo was born in Luarca, Asturias, in 1957, into a family where drawing and painting were already an inherited habit: her father, her grandfather and her great-great-grandmother all drew before her. Her first attempt, she says, was a hand-drawn comic strip retelling the Spanish folktale of the vain little mouse, made at four or five years old — the first in a series that hasn't stopped since.
She never studied art formally, but she fondly remembers the top marks she earned in Art History and Biology for illustrating her answers rather than writing them out: the orders of Greek architecture, the parts of a plant, sketched in the margin of the exam. Outside the classroom she was, and still is, a voracious reader and a lover of music.
Her teenage years brought, predictably enough, a fascination with the Impressionists; later she discovered the rest of the painting movements. Those same years marked the start of her travelling: she first set out to see the world at ten, and she hasn't really stopped since.
Teaching English was her first way of crossing borders without quite leaving home. Then came the flights: cabin crew for Iberia throughout the eighties, an entire decade measured in take-offs, landings, and the words you learn simply by repeating them in every airport.
She married a Swede and settled in Sweden, where she learned the language and let herself be absorbed by its customs: the short-lit winters, punctuality as a form of affection, silence as just another way of talking. It was there, through those long winters, that she began to paint in earnest.
She has lived in the United States, Sweden and Spain, and has also spent long stretches of time in France. She speaks the language of each of those countries, and all of them, she says, have left their mark on her. From each one she also carried away friendships she still keeps, now scattered across half the world — the reason, she says, she has never quite finished unpacking.
Every painting is a way of going back to a place without getting on a plane.
If she had to single out one thing about her painting, it would be the study of light and colour. She considers herself a better painter than draughtswoman, and lets herself be guided more by instinct than by calculation — though she's quick to credit the great teachers who taught her most of what she knows.
I paint because not painting is not a choice: it's in my DNA. How you look at things matters in every part of life — in painting, it's everything.