About the artist:

Jaime de Jaraíz (Jaraíz de la Vera (Cáceres), 1934 - Madrid, 2007) was a Spanish painter and musician. Born on April 23, 1934 in the street that takes its name from Jaraíz de la Vera (Cáceres) in the bosom of a family in which there were no artistic precedents with the name of Jaime García Sánchez. From a very young age he will begin to take an interest in drawing, reproducing tirelessly the spaces, elements and people around him. In 1950, he won the First Prize in the "First Painting Contest" organized by the Caja de Ahorros de Plasencia with the work Alegría y vino. Two years later a large religious work will be commissioned for the church of San Miguel of his native town, of which only the sketch entitled Appearance of the Virgin of Fatima to the shepherds is conserved. The success obtained in the town with this work prompted the mayor of Jaraíz de la Vera to provide a scholarship that allowed him to travel to the provincial capital and prepare in a few months for the entrance test to the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, which would overcome without difficulty. During his stay in Madrid, his visits to the Prado Museum are continuous and his training is complemented by attendance to the free classes of the Círculo de Bellas Artes. He will meet artists like Eugenio Hermoso, Aniceto Marinas, Benjamín Palencia or Zabaleta and will share a classroom, between 1953 and 1958, with authors such as Manuel Alcorto, Alfredo Alcaín, Antonio Zarco, Isabel Villar, Vicente Vela and the Extremadura Santiago Morato. In 1959 he will travel to Paris, but it will be the 1960's journey through Italian geography that will mark his artistic personality with a taste for nudity and maternity and the pursuit of beauty. At that moment he also decided to change his name to Jaime de Jaraíz, formalizing it legally for him and his descendants. After his first exhibitions in Madrid and thanks to his contacts, he soon managed to exhibit abroad: Stockholm in 1963, Johannesburg and Pretoria in 1966, Texas in 1967, New York, Dallas and Los Angeles in 1968, establishing commercial relations With American dealers that will last until the year 1974. In 1975 Jaime de Jaraíz manages to give an accolade to its race within the Spanish scope with the exhibition in the Madrilean Room Eureka, of which it will become regular during the second half of the years seventy. In Extremadura had been honored in its native town in the year 1976, becoming favorite son of Jaraíz in 1979, year in which the County council acquires its work Transfiguration light; But it was in 1980 when the painter returned to his land with his good work, being the artist in charge of inaugurating the Exhibition Hall "El Brocense" of the Diputación de Cáceres. On May 22, 1983 he will be named an academic of the Royal Academy of Letters and Arts of Extremadura unanimously of its members, being read his speech of entry, A painter confesses, which is a compendium of his ideological position on painting , On May 6, 1984 in the Church of the Monastery of Yuste. Numerous are the institutions that possess emblematic works of the painter, such as Diputaciones Extremadura, the Assembly of Extremadura, Fundación Europea Europea de Yuste or the Royal Monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe, Jaime de Jaraíz being one of the artists present in the Extremadura Pavilion Of the Universal Exposition of Seville of the year 1992. With the change of century and after fifty years of life dedicated to painting, Jaime de Jaraíz decides to compile part of his pictorial production and the most important texts made by poets, writers, critics, art historians, journalists, all friends, who Throughout his life and from the heart have dedicated some lines. The union of both elements resulted in the written work Jaime de Jaraíz. A classic of the twentieth century, edited by the foundation that bears his name and in whose realization he invested five years of his life. In 2005 the Diputación de Badajoz organized an anthological exhibition with more than one hundred of his works in the Provincial Museum of Fine Arts. The style of Jaime de Jaraíz has traveled from aesthetic academicism to pure abstraction, always in the avid search for a personality of his own in the painting he found in the late sixties with the research, discovery and use of a technique that he has Defined as "chromatic division" and that has given him the most characteristic finishing of his works. Influenced by painters from Extremadura as Luis de Morales or Francisco de Zurbarán, and Italians as Leonardo da Vinci, Rafael or Botticelli, his painting is filled with white cloths, maternal images, children and sensual nudes that characterize their universal theme populated by glazes and mystical luminosities .