Artospective: Paintings by Pedro Covo.

From the Brush of Artist Pedro Covo.

I am from a city by the Caribbean coast of Colombia called Cartagena de Indias, my mother is a teacher and my father is a Neurologist. My love for art started when I was a little kid, around 4 years old, I was amused at that time by my older brother ``paintings``, he used to do draw this cardboard characters, from superman to Sigurd the famous hero from Nordic mythology, and put them to fight in front of me to keep me busy while my parents were not at home.

At the age of 10, my mother was named headmistress of the University of fine arts in Cartagena, so I got to spend most of my evenings after school running around those classrooms. But actually I didn't wanted to study arts until I was 16 years old and I faced the hard question of what do you want to do the rest of your life. It was not an easy choice but my parents and all my family where very supportive.

I studied visual arts at the Javeriana university, to do animation, but soon enough realized that I wanted to focus on drawing and painting, and I was really lucky to had amazing teachers such as Felipe Machado, Nicolas Uribe and Justiniano Duran.

Coming from an illustration background I developed a very specific method for image making, to be very methodical really helped me with hard deadlines. So I applied this same method to my personal work, but instead of using someone else’s text I provide my own, from my quotidian experiences. That's how my swimmer serie started, basically from texts and drawings from my sketchbook.

I became obsessed by the idea of telling the story that only I could tell, to contribute with something exclusively personal, providing my vision of the world without falling in the most obvious visual solutions or clichés. That's what I attempted to do with the swimmers.

Obviously Cartagena is a city full of problems and contrast, but that was not my reality, I was just trying to be honest to who I am and where I come from, and I took the work of artist like Alejandro Obregon and Pierre Daguet who lived and painted in Cartagena as my main references.

I usually know all the subjects I paint, this is extremely important for me because I believe that if I paint my mother, there is no other artist in the world that can paint her the way I do, and this is something I want to believed is reflected in the final result,and could be appreciated by the spectator.

That is why you would notice most of my nude paintings, wich are all live digital paintings had no faces. This is in order to be able to share this images in social media without creating gossip and pre judgment, something typical in Cartagena`s society.

After finishing my university undergraduate in 2011 I got a job at the French Canadian illustration agency colagene, where I learned a lot about the illustration and advertisement business and did several jobs for important magazines and tv channels. My last job with them was to illustrate Margriet Ruus beautiful children`s book ``The elephant keeper`` which is going to be publish by Kids can press in Ontario Canada this October. This has been one of the most gratifying experiences of my editorial career because of the audience and the story itself.

A tale of an African Child that after saving an elephant from drowning, becomes an elephant keeper in an orphanage. A good portion of the royalties of the book are going to the Lilaya elephants Orphanage.

But after finishing the book I found myself unhappy with the result of most of my editorial work and enjoying more and more the work I produced In my spare time, so I decided to try to pursuit career on painting.

That is how I won a full scholarship in the Savannah colleague of art and design in Georgia United States, to do a 2 year MFA on painting.

I decided to study visual arts 11 years ago to be able to do what I enjoy the most as a job for the rest of my life, and my ambitions have not change since then.