From Photograph to Painting: The Alchemy of Light

People often ask me about my paintings. They want to know how I achieve those impossible skies, those colors that seem to exist outside of nature. But I find that the more interesting question is not how, but why, and the answer lies in the process itself. For me, the journey from photograph to finished painting is not merely a technical exercise. It is a meditation on seeing. On transformation. On the hidden truths that exist within the landscapes we pass through every day without truly observing. I am both photographer and painter, and this duality defines my work. The camera captures what exists; the brush reveals what could be. Somewhere between these two acts, between documentation and imagination, my paintings come to life.

Every painting begins with a search. I wander through cities, Madrid, London, Barcelona, New York, looking not for beauty in the conventional sense, but for potential. For images that contain within them the seeds of transformation. What makes an image speak to me? It is difficult to articulate. Often it is the architecture: the way a building meets the sky, the geometry of windows reflecting light, the tension between human structures and the atmosphere that surrounds them. I am drawn to urban landscapes because they represent our relationship with the world, our ambitions, our impacts, our fragility. Recently, I have also begun working with AI-generated imagery as a starting point. This is not a replacement for photography but an expansion of possibility. These digital foundations allow me to explore cities that exist only in imagination, utopian and dystopian visions that speak to our collective future. When I found the source image for "The Sky Is The Limit", I knew immediately that it held something powerful. The industrial skyline, the factory smokestacks reaching upward, it was a document of our age, waiting to be transformed into a warning.

This is the moment of alchemy. I take the photograph and invert it, positive becomes negative. And in that simple act, everything changes. Light becomes shadow. Shadows glow with unexpected luminosity. Colors shift to their complementary opposites: blue skies turn to amber fire, green foliage becomes magenta dreams, the gray of concrete transforms into warm ochre. It sounds technical, but the result is anything but. What the inversion reveals is a parallel world, the same city, the same structures, but seen as if through different eyes. The pollution we ignore becomes visible. The atmosphere we take for granted becomes a living, breathing entity. The sky itself becomes a character in the drama of urban existence. I do not invert images arbitrarily. I study each photograph, understanding how the transformation will affect its emotional content. Some images resist inversion; others embrace it, as if they were waiting all along to show their true face.

Before color, there is structure. Before emotion, there is discipline. I work on a grisaille foundation, a monochromatic underpainting in shades of gray. This technique comes from the old masters, and I use it for the same reason they did: it establishes value, form, and depth before the complexity of color enters the conversation. Working in grayscale forces me to see the image in its purest form. Where is the light truly coming from? What are the essential shapes? What can be simplified, and what must be preserved? This stage is meditative. The brush moves slowly, building layers of gray that will eventually disappear beneath color but will continue to influence everything above them. The grisaille is the skeleton of the painting, invisible in the final work, but essential to its structure.

Now begins the most patient phase of my process: the application of transparent oil glazes. A glaze is a thin layer of pigment suspended in medium, so thin that light passes through it, reflects off the layers beneath, and returns to the eye transformed. Unlike opaque paint that sits on the surface, glazes build luminosity from within. The color you see is not simply on the canvas; it is in the canvas, created by the interaction of multiple transparent layers. When I worked on "London Eye Spectrum", I applied over twenty glazes to achieve the final effect. Each layer shifted the color slightly, deepened the shadows, intensified the light. The famous wheel of the London Eye became a portal into another dimension, recognizable yet utterly transformed.

How do I know when a painting is complete? This is perhaps the most difficult question in art. I step back. I look. I wait. The painting either asks for more, or it releases me. There is a moment, impossible to describe but unmistakable when it arrives, when the work achieves its own presence. It no longer needs me. "Canalejas en Candilejas" took me three months to complete. It is a view of Madrid, my home city, transformed into something both familiar and strange. When I finally set down my brushes, I felt not triumph but gratitude. The painting had taught me something about the city I thought I knew.

This process, from photograph to inversion to grisaille to glaze, is more than technique. It is a way of seeing the world. We live in a moment of profound transformation, both social and ecological. My paintings do not offer answers, but they ask questions. What would our cities look like if we truly saw the atmosphere we are changing? What hidden beauty exists in the landscapes we damage? What warnings are written in light and shadow that we have trained ourselves not to read? When you stand before one of my paintings, I invite you to look not just at the image, but through it. See the layers beneath. Feel the transformation. And perhaps, when you walk through your own city afterward, you will notice the sky a little differently. The process has changed how I see. I hope the result might change how you see, too.