Return to work: Pastels and Oil Paintings (1979-1981)
From 1966 to 1978, Pilar Lara barely works, except for several private portraits produced during the two summers she spent in Cercedilla (1972 and 1973). Below you can see a portrait of her eldest son and two of her friend Laura. She did some more, also in two consecutive summers, in Villanueva de la Cañada, and they were given to the people depicted. It cannot even be said that it was a regular activity aimed not to ‘lose her touch’, so her longing for reconnecting again with her vocation was growing stronger during all those years. Then, in 1979, with her four children ‘raised’ (or almost), she decided to find a space in her life’s agenda and go back to painting. Taking into account that she needed to make up for lost time, and to a large extent, ‘start all over again’, she signed up for several drawing and painting classes at the academy founded by Manolo Arjona, a friend and classmate at the School of Fine Arts.
She attended the Academia Arjona for the following three years. She went back to the starting point and practiced the oil painting and pastels, and also how to reflect the human figure and the landscape ‘from nature’ on the canvas. This can be seen in some of the portraits of the models at the academy and in some views she painted in Villanueva de la Cañada. However, she soon became involved in new territories to experiment new languages, painting compositions and themes ‘created’ by her imagination for the first time: some canvases with sport themes of kinetic style that she submitted to the Sports Biennial of Barcelona in 1979, and even an experiment with abstraction. Her search had begun. She had already recovered her technical command of painting. Now she was only missing the form of expression she could recognise herself in.
Her inner artist was reborn in an unstoppable way, and stayed with her forever.
