“The encounter with art was like an awakening for me, as the first encounter with real life.”
Lita Cabellut was born in 1961 in Huesca (Sariñena), a town in the northeast of Spain, and grew up on the streets of Barcelona. When she was twelve years old she was adopted by a well-to-do family who introduced her to the world of art. In the Prado she was especially fascinated by the portraits of Goya, Velasquez and Frans Hals, who would become important sources of inspiration for her own painting. Seeing the Three Graces of Peter Paul Rubens made such an impression on her that she decided to become a painter.
At the age of 19 she left for the Netherlands, attracted by the unique way that light is depicted in Dutch painting. She attended Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and has lived and worked in the Netherlands since then.
Lita Cabellut paints larger than life-size portraits of well-known personalities and unknown people. These heads are isolated in the image, timeless and without specific background. Cabellut’s use of lines and colours and her painting techniques are her means of expressing the atmosphere of human emotions. In this sense, her works are more than portraits. They appeal to archetypal and existential human states of being such as sadness, fear, vulnerability and defiance.
The artist uses different materials and techniques in which both the pictorial method of the great masters from the past can be recognized as well as the atmosphere of old frescoes. For example, she uses both oil paint and tempera, a paint that can be obtained from the mixture of natural colour pigments with water and egg yolk.
Lita Cabellut has made a name for herself and exhibits in the Netherlands and abroad, both in galleries and in museums.