Salt, Sun, and Memory: My Mediterranean Childhood

To me, the Mediterranean isn’t simply a place—it’s the way I first learned to look at the world. My childhood summers on the Costa Brava shaped my sense of atmosphere, colour, and emotion long before I ever thought about painting. I remember endless hours alone by the sea in Port de la Selva: the rough texture of the rocks under my feet, my skin burnt brown by the sun, dragging a small plastic boat through the sand as if it carried an entire imaginary world behind it.

Those memories remain vivid but fragmented. Glimpses of silver fish beneath the surface, crabs disappearing into cracks in the rocks, the muffled silence underwater through a mask and snorkel. Everything felt heightened by heat and light. The white walls of the village, crooked fishing boats, and sharp contrasts between sea, stone, and sky seemed almost unreal, as though the Mediterranean itself distorted reality into something more emotional, more dreamlike.

That sensation has stayed with me. I’m not interested in painting landscapes faithfully or describing places exactly as they are. What interests me is how memory transforms them—how perspective bends through feeling, how spaces blur with time, and how certain images linger with an intensity that feels more truthful than precision itself.

In my work, the Mediterranean becomes less a geography and more a state of mind: shifting, restless, quiet, and deeply personal. The sea is never only blue; it vibrates with reflection, silence, heat, and distance. Buildings dissolve into light. Horizons drift. Distortion is not a stylistic choice for me—it is the natural language of memory.

Painting is a way of returning to those childhood sensations, not to reconstruct them, but to inhabit them again. Somewhere between observation and recollection, reality softens, narratives weaken, and something unresolved begins to emerge. What remains is atmosphere: the emotional residue of a place that never truly leaves you.