Born to Paint

From street child to celebrated artist— Lita Cabellut has a remarkable story to tell.

- Sorrel Downer

LITA CABELLUT IS ONE OF SPAIN’S MOST SUCCESSFUL LIVING ARTISTS. Her work is exhibited around the world, and her huge canvases sell for six-figure sums. At 55, she is master of her craft and living a life that even she could never have imagined as a street child, doing whatever it took to survive in a Barcelona ghetto.

Cabellut no longer lives in Barcelona, but is visiting the city from her home in the Hague, dining at a smart restaurant surrounded by uniformed waiters and suited businessmen. In contrast, she is every bit the glamorous bohemian star: part gypsy, vivacious with a throaty laugh and tumbling jet-black hair.

As she talks about her life and work, it is clear that sheer force of character is as much a key to success as her phenomenal talent.

“My life gave me a landscape with a lot of darkness,” she says, “but I believe when you are trapped in a dark place, you can draw a door in your mind and go through it into the light. Always. Even when you think ‘I am too tired’, or ‘it is too difficult’.”

Cabellut grew up in Franco’s Barcelona, a “terrible, broken place where poor people, especially gypsies, and women with children and no money fell through the net”.

She grew up in the barrio of El Raval, which in the 1960s was a notorious slum and red-light area, full of drunk sailors and sleazy bars. “We had a room, a very dark room,” she says, “and it was better and safer to be on the street. For children to live on the street, and for women to get into prostitution to survive, was normal.”