Mediterranean Childhood Memories: Port de la Selva, Costa Brava and the Origins of My Visual Language
When I think of the Mediterranean, I don't think of paintings or landscapes first. I think of being a child, spending endless hours outdoors, exploring without any particular purpose.
I grew up spending summers between places like Port de la Selva, Cala Tamariua and Sa Tuna in Begur. Those places are still tied to my earliest memories: the rocks, the smell of the sea, the intense heat, the feeling of having an entire world to discover.
I could spend hours alone along the coastline, fascinated by the rocks and everything hidden around them — small caves, fish, crabs, sea plants, the changing shapes of the landscape. I loved climbing and jumping from the rocks into the water, swimming down into the green, transparent sea below. From above, it looked so clear I could see the bottom before I even jumped.
Most days I'd take out my own small inflatable boat, imagining adventures along the coast. Sometimes the waves would splash a little water over the side, and I'd bail it out with a bucket before carrying on. I loved drifting towards places that felt completely unknown. One day the wind pushed me much further out than I expected, and I couldn't get back on my own. Eventually, some fishermen found me and brought me safely home.
The rest of those summers were made up of simpler things: building sandcastles, walking barefoot across the beach, lying on sun-warmed rocks, swimming for hours and coming home exhausted after a whole day outside. My skin was always dark from the sun, and summer felt as though it would never end.
At the time, I had no idea any of this would later shape my work as an artist. I wasn't thinking about drawing or painting — I was just observing, exploring, absorbing everything around me.
It was only years later, after living in cities like Dublin, London, Glasgow and Copenhagen, that I realised how much those early experiences had stayed with me. The intensity of the light, my relationship with colour, the way memory transforms a place — these have become central to how I draw.
I'm not interested in recreating those places as they were. Memory doesn't work like a photograph; it exaggerates, selects, leaves things behind. My coloured pencil drawings work the same way — reality passed through distortion, colour and imagination rather than reproduced.
The Mediterranean is still present in my work, not as a subject to represent, but as a way of experiencing the world: through light, colour, atmosphere, and the emotional traces a place leaves behind.
If you enjoyed this essay, you may also like:
You can also explore more original drawings in the Artworkand Shop sections.