CLARA CEBRIÁN

Clara Cebrián refuses to do anything important before 11 a.m. “I am the groundhog queen of the slow morning,” she declares. “I won’t schedule a doctor’s appointment, because I’m not going to go. I’m certainly never going to do a workout, ever.” Instead, the painter spends her mornings settling into her day with intention. Clara, who lives between Madrid, Mexico City, and Sicily, interacts with her environments very deliberately and embeds them, piece by piece, into her canvases. These then stack against her walls by the dozens, and as Clara poses among her paintings, it can almost look like she’s living inside one.

“I was a pretty bad student,” says Clara of her time growing up in Madrid. At university, she tried to study a creative field. “I failed all my classes because I’m dyslexic and made a lot of spelling mistakes, and in Spanish universities you can’t make spelling mistakes.” As a solution, she moved to London and took a course in animation. “I had always drawn in the margins of books,” says Clara, and is, in her words, “a very doodly person.” 

By learning to draw entire animations by hand, she also became a patient one. “There’s something at the base of my work that is born from my start in animation. Any arduous and detailed work for a painter, if you compare it to animation, which is thousands of frames, is nothing.” Clara found success in animation, but its world soon felt constrained. Then an opportunity brought her to Bogotá, Colombia, where she was given the space she needed to create: “Instead of a table, I had an entire room. And suddenly, my drawings became paintings.”

If having a room of her own, in the utmost Woolfian sense, allowed Clara to flourish as a painter, she describes her home-studio in Madrid’s Carabanchel neighborhood as “the biggest room of my own.” The space is a square industrial warehouse retrofitted with the help of her friend, the architect Pia Mendaro, and features steel beams, bright skylights, and a suspended sleeping platform from which Clara, ever playful, hangs for photographers. It’s here that Clara was able to wholly allow her creative universe to unfold. “I extend what is my work into inhabiting a space. To the people you invite, to what you decide to cook… to having a place to be really yourself in all those realms, just as in what you paint.”

Clara describes her paintings as “emotional landscapes,” or diaries. “They’re like the most sincere impression—as if I were to print somewhere what that moment is like for me. There can be very fleeting things, like a thought or some words. Then there are more palpable things, like a memory, when I’ll suddenly paint a little lamp, a place, a park, an idea. And then there’s that layer that’s more sensorial, which is more movements and colors.”

 Clara is great at noticing her smallest, everyday thoughts, snatching them and stamping them onto her works. There’s an irony in these scattered penciled messages, a wink of self-doubt behind their humor. “I suffer very much from all those that escape me” says Clara of her fleeting thoughts. They don’t always come when she’s at work and can tuck them away, and so often she must let them go. 

Having never formally attended art school, Clara can feel like she’s improvising what it means to be an artist. One of her objectives is to tackle her fear of the human form, because she claims, “it is what declares whether you are a painter or someone pretending to be a painter.” “Desayuno en Chacagua” is a painting Clara made years ago depicting herself and a friend sitting at a breakfast table on the Mexican coast. 

Clara’s friend stopped speaking to her after that trip; the painting was meanwhile quickly sold. Now, Clara repaints the scene every year. “It’s like a magical conjuring, or a prayer for that friendship. To see if I improve in the painting, and if that changes things.” “Desayuno en Chacagua,” in its religious undertone, is Clara’s nod to her classical predecessors. It’s also an example of her venture into more somber work, with which Clara hopes to challenge the aura of “toxic positivity”—in the Britney Spears sense—that has come to codify her work and public persona.

She has also reached the decision that, when it comes to her dearest spaces and how she fills them, she is more interested in gathering people than anything else. “One thing I’m a bit tired of is that when you sell art, it’s all about things. How beautiful this vase is. How beautiful it is to join two objects. And now, all I want is to join people in my life. To meet the best people, and to have them be ‘my things’.” To Clara, bringing people together is art. Perhaps a welcoming into her paintings.