Alejandro Blanco

My art story

I’m Alejandro Blanco and I’m 36 years old. I’m a former aspirant to boxing and fighter in the professional Mixed Martial Arts. Very unfortunately, an injury that didn’t heal during my golden years kept me from being able to continue in this profession and I stayed outside of the competition forever. It’s one of the thorns that I’ll forever carry within my heart, until I’ll die. After that, I kept on working as a sparring partner in boxing and the MMA (Mixed Martial Arts(, as well as security guard in the discos.

When the pandemic hit, I lost these jobs and that was the reason why I started to draw again.

I had been drawing during my childhood and youth, until I was 15 years old, but this time I wanted to do it as a profession, as I don’t have any other income at the moment.

My passion

I portray women because I admire women, it’s as easy as that. And also because portraying women is what has always been difficult for me: when I used to try to draw women as a child, I used to fail which is why now, when I restarted to draw as an adult, I was determined to practise over and over until I would be fine doing it. I haven’t stopped since.

I was born in 1984 but that was a confusion, I should have been born before, so that I could have enjoyed the eighties better.

The 80ies were without any doubt the best decade in everything: cinema, music and aesthetics in general and most of all speaking about female aesthetics. That’s why I just can’t stop drawing women and movies from that decade. I also work with motives from former decades and sometimes from some of the 90ies but in general I stay in the glory 80ies. It’s true that in my country, Argentina, there were a lot of bad things happening during that time, like loosing our Falkland islands for example. But when I say the “glory 80ies”, I most of all refer to aesthetics of that time. I’m inspired by pictures and movies or pictures of movies, but always vintage and normally from the 80ies of course.

Creative process

I choose the models that I want to draw following my artistic taste, but I don’t choose the pictures randomly. It has to be a picture of which I think that it would go well with my artistic style and in general I always try to get rid of some unnecessary details in the pictures and to add something to the pictures from my imagination. It might be unnecessary as well, but if I like it then I just leave it.

After choosing a picture but before starting to draw, I visualize it in my mind: the whole picture as it should look once it’s done, already without the elements that I’ll take away and already added my own elements to it. Then I do some sketches and once I’m fine and satisfied with the way they look, I transfer the sketch to paper or on a board. However, sometimes things come up spontaneously during the creative process and when that happens I usually go for them.

My colours

When I started to draw again, I already knew that I would draw mostly women, generally models from the 80ies and 90ies. Including the phosphorescent colours in the pictures happened step by step. I saw that there were a lot of already popular and acclaimed artists who were portraying women, and so many artists in general, that I started to understand that my works would have to draw attention in one way or another, in order to stand out from the big amount of works that already existed. Only like this, people would notice them and that`s the reason why I started to work with fluorescent and flashy colours.

People might like this choice of colours or might as well not like them, or even hate them but at least they aren’t unnoticed. For good or bad, they call the viewer’s attention and that’s what I need.

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