Pedro Juan Hormigo faces a lot of competition, not only from the myriad foreign artists who have made Ibiza their home, but also from the mass of artistic talent within his own family.
At a rough guess he thinks there be thirty of his relatives on the Island and he is sure there is something artistic in the genes stemming back to his grandfather who started creating religious icons and earrings in wood.
He keeps a simple crucifix made by his grandfather before he was born and in its way it is still an inspiration to him as he forges ahead with his own career as a sculptor.
Pedro was brought up in a house near where Es Paradis now stands in Sant Antoni and was quick to carry on the family tradition, carving a pendant from a small chunk of the local baladra wood used in Ibiza for making flutes. He still keeps that, too.
He was born on 4th February 1971 and at 31 he has now taught himself to handle computers and produced his own CD which chronicles his career so far. It features one of his sculptures as it revolves and shows a completely different image on each side. Next he will be up there on the World Wide Web, taking his family’s artistic heritage to a new generation.
Pedro has exciting plans and with his boundless enthusiasm and inherited artistic talent they are rapidly coming to fruition as he starts work on a new studio in the heart of the town.
His burning ambition, which seems to seep from every pore, is for busts delicately sculpted in wax and then cast in bronze. But already he is pushing his creativity further and is experimenting with holes that seem to open up the skulls and cheekbones as if he was delicately wielding a surgeon’s knife.
“My brother was always the smart one,” he says. “It was no surprise to the family when he finished up as a University teacher in Barcelona.”
“But I always seemed to struggle with my education, and I couldn’t understand why I was having problems. The ideas were always there, but I had difficulties with words.”
“It wasn’t until much later that one of my teachers explained that I was suffering from some form of dyslexia. It was such a relief to discover I had been suffering from nothing more than what we now know to be a form of word blindness.”
With the same perseverance he applies to his art, he has conquered the problem and now happily completes word puzzles from newspapers and magazines.
It was a love affair that first took him to New York about eight years ago and it was there he met a sculptor from the Ukraine and learned from a different perspective. “I never thought I would find the light I had left behind in Ibiza,” he says now. “But in a strange way it was there in New York too.”
It was back in Ibiza where Pedro’s true inspiration lay, no more so than with his Uncle, Toni, who is known on the Island as The Sculptor of Ibiza.” (See the very first “Artists on Ibiza” featured in Weekly Edition 035, Saturday 27th October 2001) Toni and occasionally his brothers Leonardo, Luis, Paco and even young sister Laly ran a successful workshop carving little heads. It’s a family affair. His Uncle’s wife is also his father’s sister. “His sons were like my brothers,” he says.
Pedro’s apprenticeship has included three years working in archaeology on the medieval walls in Ibiza Town and he has also been involved with a curving fountain in the shopping area in Ibiza Town. It spirals down like a seashell, and he points out the symbolism of male and female roles in harmony.
“I think I want people to stop and look, even if they hate what they see. Some people say it is amazing and that it makes them freak out. The worst that can happen is if it creates no reaction.”
His busts with a hole may also have skeletons carved inside, such is his creative passion. He himself gets fired up about the casting procedure, excitedly describing the heat and the “I want to show the energy of how you feel about someone, especially when you get to know their personality. I want to give something else; though I believe I need to do at least ten before I find the expression that I want.”
It comes as something of a surprise when Pedro suddenly confesses: “A lot of my creativity comes when I am in the bathroom where the wax becomes really mellow. For me, art is like giving birth.
All Pictures Courtesy of Pedro Juan Hormigo
Sinclair Newton