I'm a Spanish-born painter, raised in Málaga, where I've been based again for the past three years after nearly two decades in London. I paint human nature: naked, unprotected and pure.

What I think sets my work apart is where it comes from. I didn't arrive at painting through a straight line — I arrived at it through resistance. Growing up in Málaga, I pushed against my family's expectations and against emotions that felt too intense to contain any other way. Art was the one place those feelings had room to exist. In my early teens I started studying masters as different from each other as Velázquez and Hokusai, and Hokusai in particular planted something that wouldn't surface in my own work for years: a pull toward Japanese art and culture that I still carry with me.

In my early thirties, convinced I wasn't living up to my own potential, I enrolled at the Facultad de Bellas Artes in Seville, a traditional art school where I learned to actually draw and paint, and to understand what colour and light do in a picture. I then moved to London, where I kept training at LARA, the Art Academy and the New School of Art, and lived for the best part of seventeen years. That combination — classical Spanish technique layered onto an instinct I'd had since childhood, and a Japanese sensibility I picked up as a teenager and only returned to as an adult — is, I think, what makes my paintings look and feel the way they do.

Three years ago I moved back to Málaga, the town I grew up in. I love the light here, and the life is vibrant in a way I'd almost forgotten. But I still feel linked to other places — London most of all, and Japan, which has stayed with me since I was a teenager without ever really having lived there. I think that's true of most of my work: it doesn't belong entirely to one place, and neither do I.

My work lives in the world of human emotion: joy, intimacy, conflict, peace, life in the round. I'm not interested in painting people as they present themselves — I'm interested in what's underneath that. A painting might start from something I lived through, a dream, a desire, a moment of curiosity, or simply the need to hold onto an image that caught me and wouldn't let go. What I try to give people, every time, is honesty rather than polish.