Valencia
He was born in 1950 in the same Cabañal and his destiny did not seem oriented towards painting. At home there was a need for money and he had to get to work very quickly, on whatever it was. Following family tradition, he took a job at the Tabacalera, packaging cigarettes, and was a kitchen maid. But he liked to admire the impressionist masters and he was also enthusiastic about post-impressionism. The painting bug finally caught on when he was 25 years old. At that time he painted on the docks of the port of Valencia. And there the small miracle occurred that would lead him towards the splendid professional career that José Luis displays today: I was adopted by the painters of the famous Pont de Fusta group. This popular group, which acquired such a name because most of its members met around the old wooden bridge over the Turia, near the Torres de Serranos, was formed, among others, by Jorge Guillemot, Máñez, Estellés, Moya, López Tébar, Arnedo, Vázquez Castells... Checa admits that they took pity on me; It's not that they saw enough raw material for me to develop, although they did have a lot of enthusiasm, and they told me: come on, come with us. Checa is a retina artist, alert and hypersensitive who is moved by the beautiful and changing chromatic epidermis of nature; a painter in love with the most transitory and fleeting things in the world and the environment: the light, the sky, the clouds, the water... and for the same reason, Czech is also and will always be a landscape painter, which is what they were, essentially, the oldest and purest ones affiliated with impressionism. He has a Sorolla air that he likes and even cultivates unconsciously, based on his enormous modesty. He has a full beard and wears a straw hat when he traces on the canvas the accurate brushstrokes that transmit the impressions of shapes and colors that his half-closed eyes capture. Because José Luis Checa is an impressionist painter, like Sorolla, bridging the gap, and he usually paints under the intense light of the beaches of Cabañal and Malvarrosa. He truly physically remembers Sorolla, full beard, straw hat when he paints and an impressionistic brushstroke that transmits all the light and color of the beaches of Cabañal and Malvarrosa. From there he began a long self-taught journey, but with the commendable technical support of Guillemot, who was the one who showed me the technique, the basis. He never went to a regular painting school, but he reached a tacit agreement with Guillemot: I would take him in my car and he would teach me. Thus he became an impressionist, a follower of the classical lineage of the Spanish painters who went to Rome - like Sorolla himself, or Martín Rico -, and acquiring the influence of Venetian themes, which he now captures with great rigor in his paintings. he. He paints from life and reinterprets what he sees, but without fear, going to the bull's eye, although later he retouches in the studio, naturally, he perfects something, but without getting lost in too many retouches on the first impressions, because then you end up spoiling it. He points out that sometimes he paints more for me and other times he must opt for food paintings, because you have to live, and if clients prefer a certain line, a product, you have to offer it to them. And he confesses that, as a professional artist, it was his relationship with Galería de Arte Subastas de Valencia that gave him the definitive support to launch it.
jose-luis-checa-87/Sorolla.com
