“Working on imagination with children is great.”

Creator Maeba Martinez celebrates the art therapy project she is implementing with minors with ALES at the Jaén Hospital

Maeba Martinez Olivares (Linares, 1980) discovers a new aspect of his creative abilities. And the “fault” lies with minors. ALES Association. “I love working with them. I challenge them to draw until they succeed and we forget where we are, like in meditation,” the creator says in a statement to this newspaper.

It was late last year when Maeba Martinez began working with teenage cancer patients at the hospital. He says he takes out a backpack of materials once a week and questions the kids until they spark their imaginations. “The other day someone drew a picture of themselves on an octopus on the beach,” he describes.

Accustomed to working with adults with Alzheimer’s and intellectual disabilities, the creative personality is excited about a project that inevitably leads her to a difficult time in her life, the loss of her father to cancer. “I was a teenager, and art saved me at that time. This is where my passion for art therapy comes from,” he says.

Stolen painting

On the other hand, Martinez recently had the unfortunate experience of discovering that a painting had been stolen from his exhibition. Logbook, 20 years of pictorial biography. “I only reported this online. It was a self-portrait from a series called Omphalos which I started while studying fine art in Granada,” he explains. “It saddens me because of the symbolism that the painting had on an emotional and artistic level. I hope whoever did this will change his mind,” he adds.

Not only is he not disappointed, but he perceives this episode as another impetus for creativity and does this in his workshop in Plaza Obispo García de Castro, next to La Alameda. And he warns that he has room for creativity: “Sooner or later I will have a new exhibition.”