Aside from in my bedroom when I was fourteen, I have never painted before in my life.

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So it was with some trepidation that I let myself be talked into attending Pamplona’s annual painting contest, held this year on Sunday the 4th of June in Molino de San Andrés in Villava. At 9:50 we queued to collect our canvases, nametags and meal-tickets for lunch, all of which were included in the €7 ticket price.



Materials obtained, we looked about for a place to put our stuff. Most of the hardcore painters seemed to have brought along their own tables and chairs and had set up camp along the river. There’s a €2000 prize for first place and, one of my more experienced friends tells me, first place always goes to someone who has painted their view of the park. Given that between us, we intend to paint a family landscape, some giraffes, and a bunch of flying fish, we have no qualms about finding a picnic table somewhere out of the way with a cluster of similarly-minded painters who aren’t there for the prize, just for the fun of painting in the outdoors for the day.



One of them is kind enough to lend my giraffe-painting chum his smartphone so that she can find herself a photo reference; this is the kind of atmosphere there, where strangers lend you their phones, and whenever you need a break from your own painting you can wander around and take a look at what other people are doing.



And what other people are doing is brilliant, varied, and inspiring. Some people are using photo references— the man with the phone is painting a strange twilight world with a thin white bridge stretching out into the distance — and some people are painting something from the inside of their own minds.



One of them, sharing our table with us, says that the most important thing is that the painting makes you feel something. “But,” he says, “the same kind of painting wins every year.”

 

































​I decide to leave them.

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Somewhere between doing my pencil sketch and starting to paint, my self-consciousness has faded away. I stop worrying about being perfect and start having fun instead. I have a strange curling tree, the sea, the sky, and some gigantic lurid fish hurtling towards the sun.



This is when I make another discovery: painting takes a long time. My wrists are starting to hurt and I have the back of a grandma from leaning down to load my brush with more paint. My first ever painting is still largely without colour and the tree is a bare, dark thing, but I feel like I’ve been painting for hours.



Some of my friends— canvas-less— are wandering around, looking bored.  I have moments of genius sometimes.  I find three more brushes and hand them out.  This is when my painting transforms itself.



The people who wander past to see what we’re doing stop to admire Andreea’s giraffes, which are gorgeous, textured, soft-eyed creatures peering out from her canvas, the epitome of giraffedom. Our canvas receives puzzled encouragement.



“It has something,” says one little old lady, squinting at our strange Dali-esque landscape. There is a bloody eye weeping tears into the ocean and what might be a flying wolf heading towards the sun. The sea has taken over and it looks like the sky has leaked all over the tree.



Shortly before four o’clock, we head back to the pavilion, which is where everyone who wants to can display their canvases to be judged. The judges take their time walking a circuit around the display and on their second time around, the paintings which don’t meet with their approval get turned around. After that, another circuit, and another, until three winners are chosen.



Our painting is turned around straight away, which is no great surprise; but much to our surprise, so are several of the canvases we had remarked upon earlier. Beautiful, unique, fascinating paintings. One of them is a metallic canvas with a door handle and an open, rainbow-spattered book stuck onto it, which receives a lot of attention from the contest-visitors and nothing from the judges. This is a worrying theme to the painting contest. The paintings which we notice and remark on are the ones turned around pretty damn quickly.

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Fermín Lizarraga Lázaro, age 29, is the eventual winner of the contest. His painting is of the graffiti on the wall on the other side of the river— in other words, a painting of his view of the park. But what makes this an interesting painting is not the technical skill of the painter, nor even the idea of a painting within a painting, but the fact that the graffiti on the wall was painted by Lizarraga himself some years ago.



The symmetry of this is, perhaps, what merits the €2000 prize.  Not the view of the park.