Artist’s background
Ojembarrena’s encounter with Painting takes place in Paris when he is 19 years old. Contemplating the work of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Monet, Bonnard, Picasso, and other masters, he experiments a joy and an education which will last for the rest of his life.
He takes his first steps as a painter while he teaches Contemporary Literature in Norwich University, Vermont, by the hand of the American painter B.A. King.
When he moves to California to teach at the State University of California at San Bernardino, for two years he attends regularly to the Life Drawing and Painting classes at the Fine Arts School and participates with an abstract painting at the 1982 Fine Arts School Exhibition.
After his return to Spain in 1982 to teach at the University of the Basque Country, he starts an apprenticeship with the Spanish Master and Professor of the Fine Arts School Agustin Reche Mora, which will last to the present. For a good many years, Reche Mora conducts him, painting by painting along the path of the practice, theory and history of Painting.
Ojembarrena has accomplished three solo exhibitions:
- In 2016 at the Gallery of the Biscay Lawyers Association in Bilbao.
- In 2017 at the Gallery of the City Council of Garai, Biscay.
- In 2018 at the Gallery of the Durango Artists Association.
Artistic vision
Ojembarrena´s approach to Painting runs along the following words of Cézanne:
The thesis to develop -whatever our temperament or form of power in the presence of nature- is to give the image of what we see, forgetting everything that appears in front of us. Which, I think, should permit the artist to give all his personality, large or small.
***
Treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, with everything put in perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed to a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon convey breadth, weather of a section of nature, or if you prefer, of the spectacle that the Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus spreads out before our eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon convey depth. Now nature, for us men, is more depth than surface, hence the need to introduce into our vibration of light, represented by reds and yellows, enough blue, to make the air palpable.
***
With a small temperament one can be quite a painter. One can make some fine things without being much of a harmonist or a colorist. It’s sufficient to have a feeling for art -and without doubt it’s the horror of the bourgeois, this feeling.
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