Lita Cabellut (1961) is considered one of the most important Spanish artists of our time. Since the age of 19, she has been living in the Netherlands, where she was named 'Artist of the Year' in 2021. She is best known to the general public as a jury member of Project Rembrandt, a Dutch TV series from 2019 and 2020 in which contemporary amateur painters creatively competed against each other.

TEXT WIM DE JONG

PHOTOGRAPHY: NOPOINTSTUDIOS

Okay, she was a bit afraid that for this story she would have to pose in a red flamenco dress with castanets, but even without such attire, you quickly notice that you are dealing with a real and very special Spanish woman in Lita Cabellut. Sit down at her kitchen table for a conversation and as an interviewer you immediately feel like you have met the woman of your life. Wow, that fire that you constantly see burning in her eyes as she tells her life story and talks about her art. And, gosh, that loving temperament with which she mothers her children and her eight employees in her beautiful studio cum residence in the heart of The Hague. It's no wonder that they all adore her, and you too are enchanted within minutes.

TYPICAL 'SPANISH MOM'

As independent and freedom-loving as she has been since childhood, the warmth that La Lita radiates is just as natural. "I can't hide it: I am and always will be a typical Spanish mama. Constantly busy for everyone, and therefore also a busybody. I consider all the people I love to be my immediate family. And family is everything, everything, everything to me. Even when I'm up to my neck in work, I always want to know if someone is taking good care of themselves and if I need to fry them an egg." Laughing: “Well, that's my cultural heritage. It's just in my DNA.” Lita Cabellut's DNA is also a sight to behold in other ways. She has a unique talent as a visual artist. At 62, she is still the unpolished and ravishing figure who betrays much of her Sinti origins. And partly because she roamed the red-light district of Barcelona as a street child until the age of fourteen, she draws on a life experience that to this day has produced nothing but wisdom, positivity, and an incredible drive.

MAGICAL KEY

Lita: "I see my existence as a series of long walks through constantly changing landscapes. Like everyone else, I also encountered obstacles along the way. Still, I knew I had to keep walking through every landscape, because everything I experienced there was only temporary. My childhood shaped me, it didn't traumatize me. I have a natural tendency to accept things as they come. And to let them go again. They didn't cling to me. I am not a victim of what happened to me." Lita owes her positivity in part to the “magic key” with which she says she was born. As a young outcast abandoned by her mother, she plucked stars from the sky and gave them to passersby on the sidewalk. And rather unusually, she ate flowers to nourish herself with beauty. The paintings in her impressive, internationally exhibited and sold oeuvre are, among other things, the result of this. 'In my work, I can make tangible the beauty I have always sought. It is no longer just a canvas with paint, or ordinary matter. It has become energy, emotion, imagination.

IN LOVE WITH THE NETHERLANDS

As a teenage girl, Lita was adopted by a wealthy Madrid family, a completely different, posh existence in which she was actually very happy. Nevertheless, she also said that she bid farewell to that ‘landscape’ for good at the age of nine when she was given the opportunity to study at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. At that art school, which was the most highly regarded in Europe at the time, a whole new world lay at her feet. 'I didn't speak Dutch or English and was often considered an oddball, but I immediately fell in love with the Netherlands. All those different nationalities living together here and the open, humanitarian character of society, I thought it was fantastic.' Even now, Lita can wax lyrical about how much she loves her second homeland. 'I even dream in Dutch.' When she spends weeks in Spain for an exhibition or work meeting, she constantly misses her studio apartment in The Hague and her second home in Bergambacht. She usually spends her weekends at the latter, a farmhouse surrounded by two thousand trees she planted herself. The little free time she has that isn't completely filled with painting is spent thinking about her family.

KEEP GOING OR KEEP GOING?

Question to Lita: is it conceivable that she - after all, only a few years away from her retirement - will ever completely give up her artistry and enjoy a well-deserved pension. Her answer: 'Ha, that issue also occupies itself. Why do I continue, in the end, I am tired in the evenings just like everyone else? But I can't give up collaborating. Working is the extension of my breath. If I stop doing art, I stop living, I am sure of that.' But I see a knitting project on your couch. So, you already have a hobby, Lita. 'Hahaha, that's not a knitting project. Those are just my socks!'