Madrid Academy of Art

“The self-taught option is viable depending a little on your way of being. I think that if you are demanding with yourself it is a good tool. Only that all human beings tend to the comfortable. I myself, for example, was hitting me like blows. I started with painting, I realized that I wasn’t going that way. I went back and resumed drawing. I went much further back, until I started at the beginning, because I understood that it was a process that started from one place and you couldn’t start halfway…”

“I’m sure it’s more difficult because you’re going to make a lot more mistakes and it’s going to take longer to specify an address and a path, and you’re going to waste time and probably get somewhere, but you’re going to arrive later and more tired. The MAA program is much more direct than anything else I can find right now…”

“Until a certain point. When you find a limit. Like the conversation I had with the teacher the other day. He told me: “I see that you are reaching a limit and you say, well this is it, and what I do is push you further, against that limit so that you cross it”. I think that you need someone to do it, you are not going to do it. When they teach you what is logical, what is the path, you already know that it is there…”

“Normally in others academies they do not give the importance to the drawing that it deserves. Broadly speaking, I have found training centers where people went more to meet other people, to hang out, to develop that hobby, to do something successful, beautiful, that they could teach their friends. But they didn’t have that restlessness or that hunger to perfect themselves, this academies focused more on not frustrating people too much and not losing extra income…”

“It’s a lot of money and obviously not everyone can afford it. And I feel quite privileged to be able to pay for it and thus be able to maintain a normal life, without luxuries, but normal. And it’s not expensive. The service as such, the new facilities, the hours you can have a day with a model, if you attend in the morning and in the afternoon… You can’t find that anywhere. You can find similar things, but not everything in one place, it’s not expensive, I think it’s very good…”

“It requires you to have some savings, to have an economic cushion, even if you need to leave your job for a while to be able to support yourself with those savings. But it’s worth it. It’s worth it because it’s not money wasted by the academy. Because they do care about the training of people, about the teachers they bring, about the facilities, it is something serious and professionalism has to be paid for…”

“I know people who also like art, obviously friends of mine, but I think it wouldn’t work for everyone. It all depends on how you approach art. There are people who just like art as a way to blow off steam or relax. A friend of mine, for example, tells me: “I really like painting because I relax a lot”. And I say to him: “And how do you relax?” (laughing)… “but it’s a pain” (keep laughing) “I don’t get this part, review it, do it again…”

“I would recommend it to someone who is very clear that they want to dedicate themselves to this, to be an artist, painter, sculptor… and to people of Fine Arts who like technique…”

“I need to work to pay for this and apart from taking a lot of time from where I can to be able to come. And dedicating all that time to it is not easy. As I have a personal situation where I don’t have children, that makes it easier for me to be able to dedicate time to this…”

“I like one thing about the school that I haven’t found before. Have a clear methodology. Because what I have found so far is spending a lot of time on an activity in which you do not notice that you are making progress. You can be there for years and years and you don’t advance. I have met people who have spent more than 20 years painting photographs and in the end they don’t know how to do anything else. It leads nowhere…”

“I like communication with the teacher. I think they adapt well to the student. Not only at their level, but how they address the student. From my experience, they arrive, they go well with what they tell you. I get home and listen to the teacher in my head repeating technical aspects to me. And I think that happens because they do it well. Because they are very flexible. Because they do not treat all students in the same way. Which is what has been happening to me all my life. And here they go at your own pace. Here is work and support…”

"The time you dedicate to it is to achieve a goal that they have clear. And if you have fulfilled it and you have fulfilled it well, because they are very demanding, a door opens to the next phase. Then you see that you are moving towards something…”

“Because of my way of being self-demanding, I went looking for a bit of that knowledge that I lacked and dedicated time to it. What’s up? That one is aware that when you dedicate time to something certain, there are things that you like more than others and I lacked that discipline and I left things aside. It was easier to draw pictures while watching TV because it is less tiring, on the one hand, it has its advantages, but on the other, its drawbacks…”

“Depends on what is expensive for you, indeed it is expensive, but if you really have a dream… how expensive is it to fulfill it? For example, there are people who pay a lot of money for a home that is not going to give them as much satisfaction as the time one spends here drawing, painting, sculpting, it depends on your preference, on what makes you happy…”

“In the academy where I was, I told them about the possibility of taking models to work from life. And they told me that if they began to bring models to paint from life, the students would get frustrated, they would not want to continue and they would want to leave…”