NATALIA ROMERO PADILLA

ART THERAPIST

Natalia was born in Alcalá la Real (Jaén) in 1988. Natalia cannot remember a time when she stopped drawing, believing It has always accompanied her. When Natalia was 10 years old, she won a poetry prize at school which brought her immense joy and great surprise: it was the affirmation that it was valid, that she could feel safe placing attention and faith in her own creative world.

This encounter equipped her with creative sovereignty, followed by many contests of drawing, more battles lost than won and at a very early age she painted her first mural in high school.

Shortly after, during adolescence, Natalia decided to process her own anxieties by painting the walls of her bedroom with large figures that captured on their skin the traces of her rabid tears from that time. It was then that she decided without hesitation to study to be an art therapist.

During her studies to become a Graduate in Fine Arts (University of Granada 2012) Natalia forgot her “therapeutic purpose” with art, and dove into the study of drawing and painting techniques at a time when the digitalization of life was opened voraciously. When she finished her studies, Natalia made some editorial publications and decided to go on a trip to Latin America.

There she stayed for five years. She got to know the jungle and it captured her deeply. She (the forest) took her between her vine, her leaf and her river and did not let her go until she changed her skin. Absolutely.

From this moment her creativity returned to its original therapeutic direction and since then Natalia has been dedicated to her own artistic expression studies and knowledge. The drawing and the word have been guides for her, a kind of oracle in which she, consciously and unconsciously, can give birth to pieces of a puzzle that make sense within herself in time.

The artistic studio itself becomes a quality space in which she can build upon her internal world with absolute freedom, as much as she lets it emerge.

Natalia works with children in schools addressing artistic works with a therapeutic approach and it is her wish to continue investigating and studying this field, the spirit and the psyche, and how artistic creation is, for human beings, an immense source of self-knowledge and healing.