jose manuel carballal Biography
ARTISTIC CV
I was born in Madrid, very close to the Prado Museum, where my parents live and work during the post-war period. My father as a builder, with his office opposite the Retiro Alto park. My mother as manager of Vera hairdressing salons (her brother and my godfather). My uncle has a salon two blocks from the Retiro, another in the American airbase in Torrejón de Ardoz and another in Paris (Presidente Hotte Coifure Francese). He paints and his uncle, who made the Garçón hairstyle fashionable in Paris, (also painter), are the first art teachers I have. They teach me about Goya, Velázquez, and other friends, who usually pass through their hairdressers’. My mother loves art and she makes me a fan of classical music, and takes me to Spanish guitar classes with my cousin. Her children, today, study piano and violin.
Throughout my youth in the “movida madrileña” cultural movement, Galician, and the cultural opening of the country, I participate in various artistic groups, in painting, music, theatre, cinema and television. Always as a hobby, as my father forbid me from devoting myself exclusively to art. One of the best guitar players at the time shares holidays with me and teaches me little things to improve my artistic abilities. It was the first time I saw a Fender Stratocaster close up. I am 14 (1979).
In the following years, my father, in addition to being a builder, will devote himself to restoring many of Madrid’s emblematic buildings (I work with him restoring the Gran Café de Gijón de Madrid.) Its frescos and its columns are left in original condition. Today it has been painted white. Terrible! This café is where Unamuno, García Lorca, Francisco Umbral, Fernando Fernán Gómez, and other famous artists often meet to debate hard to resolve matters.
My father wants me to be an architect. I prefer the Interior Design School, which is two houses away from the French Embassy, very close to the Prado Museum. There, I study all the modern pictorial techniques, combining it with classical Renaissance studies, where at sixteen years of age, I already imitate a Van Gogh, in oil, as classwork. Finishing the last year in the Ruiz Picasso school in La Coruña, in the midst of the launch of Galician fashion and with a model girlfriend, which further opens up the doors to the artistic world to me.
I am 20, I have studied a drama course and am combining the last year of the degree in La Coruña with work as a window dresser in El Corte Inglés, where I learn to handle materials and sculpt expanded polyethylene.
My girlfriend leaves me, and I decide to go back to Madrid at the age of 21. I work with my father, as decorator and restorer, and I combine it with window dressing of one of the multinationals in the Salamanca district (the classical centre of Madrid).
Working in a family company limits my growth and window dressing does not make me feel fulfilled.
I begin to study dubbing, TV, radio and Drama.
At the age of twenty-five, when I have one year left in my drama course, I sell advertising to pay the course costs. One night Emiliano Hernando, producer of the Spanish group Los Pecos (international at that time), calls me to his office and asks me how my classes were going. He takes me to the station fish bowl and says that I have seven guests and that the presenter is ill. I face, for the first time, my first interview on an open table during five hours with different guests. Emiliano is happy and decides to give me the program. I continue with this during one year, and the average audience is half a million listeners. The program improves and we sign a contract with a better national music station, R-TOP 40 R España, where I continue for another year. I am now a professional journalist.
At the same time, I start working in an estate agent’s, and then continue producing theatre and TV. I create works in water-soluble pencil and sell everything. Oil with spray. Always to friends of the family or usual customers and contacts, without any difficulty.
The real estate market begins to attract me and I leave the radio, holding public speaking classes for executives. I create the method of my book Arte Fusión Ciencia (Art Fusion Science), which I put into practice as real estate director, and train executives using a mixed artistic/executive method, with exceptional results.
I study mathematics, quantum physics and other courses and subjects, until now. I travel to half the globe on my holidays.
I continue with illustrations, but without the time to do work. This has been for the last two years. Business has been quite positive for me and the free time has enabled me to do commissioned work for friends and customers and for some of the world’s institutions and museums.
If you want we can gather together friends from the whole world and I can recite poetry, accompanied by my Fender guitar, in Spanish, English and French.
Although my parents were born and grew up in the emblematic Salamanca District, the Spanish version of Chelsea, and my education is more modern, my studio is located where I grew up and lived, in the emblematic Avda. de América district where Almodóvar developed his career. I saw him some times on the stage in Rockola. And now they have built a huge hotel in the district which is designed both on the outside and the inside, by different colleagues, and is very pretty.
Best regards,
José Manuel Carballal
