"The Cornfield" a painting from John Constable 1826

This is the picture I saw for the first time, when I was a small child of 3 or 4 years old, it was and it still ramains hanging at the wall of the main room of my great aunt's house (Mitica) in Barcelona, ​​I was always awe-struck by the child of the picture that appears face down near the edge of the water; I always thought at that tender age that the child lay wounded on the ground, I did not get to imagine that it was a shepherd boy drinking water at the edge of a small pond, that's why John Constable called his painting generally: "The Drinking Child ". I could not distinguish the water, because the painting that is hanging in my great aunt's house (Mitica), is a unicoloured copy of green tones. It was the first painting I could contemplate and appreciate, the traces of the painting always caught my attention, I was completely engrossed, I saw the country scene and I imagined the countryside outside of Barcelona, ​​the lands of my grandfather as well as the ones who belongs to my great-aunt (Mitica); I had not seen cows in the picture and I remember consulting at Mitica: -What animals are those? -, and she answered me: - They are sheep! -; but in our fields there were no sheep but cows, and a long time ago, there were goats in large numbers.

From a distance, the painting always made a deep impression on me, especially the big tree on the left, the sensation that it caused in me, it was the sensation of being feeling a cool breeze under its shadow, it seemed that its leafy branches and leaves had movement; that image had life, it created sensations, it was a melancholy image of peace and rural tranquility, that was peacefull. During years I stood gazing at the painting, it still remains in the same place, silently at the wall; Once being 10 or 11 years old, I remember asking myself ephemerally: -Who will be the author of that painting ?, Who will have painted it? -, nobody never introduced us, we were just in that room during my childhood and sporadically in my trips to Barcelona.

Only a few years ago, unwittingly, a pleasant serendipity occurred; looking for pictures of corn in the Google search engine, that picture with all its colors appeared in front of me, it was a pleasant reunion, accompanied by a smile looking at the past. So I could know that the author of the first painting I saw in my life, was an English landscape artist named "John Constable " and had painted it in 1826.

Although it is not his most famous painting, I began to see many of his other works, the feeling was the same, they were very relaxing country images, full of a sweet melancholy, it was a silent poetry that expressed a lot through the static color that acquired movement in the silhouettes of the trees, his works were the representation of the breeze in the fields of his childhood in Suffolk, in a way so precise and sharp that almost seemed to paint the wind.

I have proposed myself on trying to do the same as John Constable, painting the fields outside of Barcelona that I contemplated in my childhood, today everything is very different from what it was 28 years ago, therefore, remembering the bucolic images of the past and try to give them life in detail on a canvas, it is a challenge!, it would have been a little easier if I kept or had at my disposal a photograph of 28 years ago of the country house and its surroundings, and then make a magnificent picture, I would leave record of an instant from the past, perhaps it is easier to record the present, it is a matter of time, passion and technique.

When you look closely at Constable's paintings, you can see that his prints are rough and coarse, even using the spatula to place the colors; he was always criticized in his time for the lack of clean and orderly finish to which he replied:

" There is nothing ugly, I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what may - light, shade and perspective will always make it beautiful"
(No hay nada feo, nunca vi algo feo en mi vida: que la forma de un objeto sea la que sea- la luz, la sombra y la perspectiva siempre lo harán bello) John Constable

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