Artist Portfolio Jorge Jimenez

The DC artist tells Gary evans how his career began with an epiphany during a physical education exam

Jorge Jiménez was in the third year of his physical education degree, and it was exam time. The Spaniard studied hard. He felt ready. Then something weird happened. He looked around and saw how his classmates seemed really motivated by what they were doing. He didn’t have that. Sitting there in the classroom that day, Jorge had a bit of epiphany, a quiet little moment of revelation.

“I felt a bit out of place,” Jorge says, “and, suddenly, it was as if my eyes were opened, and I thought: ‘I am not this. Here, I’m just making up the numbers. I’m a cartoonist, and I’ve always been a cartoonist!’” There was just one problem. Jorge hadn’t drawn anything for years…

He grew up on the outskirts of Cádiar, a small mountainous village in the Granada region of southern Spain. His brothers were much older, so Jorge spent a lot of time alone. The one thing he always had was his drawing. His mother encouraged him. She made sure he had plenty of paper, oils, pencils and watercolours. But she challenged him, too. Jorge liked to sketch the cartoons he was waiting on TV. But his mother told him: watch first, draw later. This forced him to work from memory.

When he got a bit older, his parents signed him up for painting classes at a local art school. Because Jorge had always drawn freely, he found it frustrating when, during a still life class, a “bad art teacher” tried to force him to learn the measuring technique, where the artist holds out a pencil and squints at his subject.

“All the magic of drawing disappeared doing this and so, after a few days, I stopped attending class, and I promised that I wouldn’t dedicate myself to drawing. If this was the price of living to draw, I didn’t want that.”