Patty Fuentes combines her work as a professional designer with her passion for illustration, although it is the latter that has accompanied her since she was very young, as she herself tells us in the studio she has set up in her home in Palma. "I've spent my life drawing and I was lucky that my family was very supportive. My sister took me to contests and my mother to academies," begins this artist from Murcia, who surprises us both by her honesty when she speaks and by her ability to move through her creative language.
In her native Murcia, she goes on to explain, when she finished high school she studied illustration and during her internship, in which she drew non-stop labels for bean and chickpea jars, she understood that she needed something more. To go one step further. In response to that longing, she decided to deepen her training and moved to Valencia to study Fine Arts. Since then, she has not stopped drawing.
A fan of comics, at first, she started "selling on a page on Etsy with very cartoon illustrations" but in 2019, after participating in a Rata Market, she felt a push and took the leap. "I went with a mix of what I was doing and I saw that what the public liked the most was what I do today. Then I started with social networks, which have been very important to make my work known out there," she explains.
When she started selling her work online, she confesses, "selling something that didn't have much to do with me made me less embarrassed," but now her work bears her stamp, which she has been refining over the years, and in which portraiture predominates. Since that 2019 and in this exploration, Patty has been finding new ways to express herself, although, as she tells us, "I don't like to be a slave to a style", to a single way of creating.
"For me it was easier to express myself with a drawing, it was a way to let off steam".
"Over time you find your language. It's been a bit of trial and error. Well, no, there's no mistake possible," Patty says with a smile. She speaks bluntly, without any squeamishness, when she reviews the road she has traveled so far. Perhaps because illustration, as she confesses, has been part of her therapy after a series of family losses. "For me it was easier to express myself with a drawing, it was a way of letting off steam". That's why she didn't sell her work, because it was an internal work, a means of channeling and expressing that connects with people, no doubt, because now what most people who follow her tell her is that "they feel identified with the message" of her illustrations.
Her audience, she acknowledges, is mainly female, and Patty appreciates that they stop to chat with her at a flea market or give her their opinion when they buy a work from her because "you have a contact that is gold and talking to people you realize that there are things that happen to you that, in reality, are universal."
"I always say: don't think about being Picasso. Enjoy the process".
Pursuing this vocation to converse, to share and who knows if also to find that which is universal in us, Patty has been teaching workshops for adults since 2020. The first opportunity arose when a friend introduced her to Casa Planas and then the proposal moved to Estiu Concept Store, where she also sells her work (as well as on her website). Since then, the workshops have been taking shape faithful to the same philosophy: that learning should always be fun and democratic - the students choose what they want to do - and the space should be a safe meeting place where people feel comfortable. The best thing? That "a family atmosphere has been created. We laugh a lot.
Some of the students have been taking part in the workshops since the beginning. One of them, in fact, "did a portrait of her father and two and a half years later she did it again. It's very nice to see the evolution," explains Pat. The idea here is to combine creativity, learning and enjoyment, and this is how she transmits it in class: "I always say: don't think about being Picasso. Enjoy the process.
The illustrations of this "orchestra woman", as she defines herself, are printed on prints, tote bags, mugs, and have been exhibited in Madrid, Murcia and Palma (on the island, the most recent exhibitions have been installed in Estiu, Suquía and Biocalma. In addition, Pattysaurus draws portraits on commission and is now working on a very special project: a particular work that will occupy an entire wall, an express request that surprised the artist herself but which, of course, she took on with enthusiasm. "I've never gotten used to not knowing what commissions are going to come in. There has been a lot of roller coaster" she admits when talking about her condition of freelance artist, in constant struggle with her impostor syndrome, but proud -and rightly so- of being able to live from a passion she is really good at.
