Interview with Francisco Bravo Cabrera

Francisco is a blogger, poet, artist, composer, videographer, and businessman. He has also been introducing us to women artists and creators in a series of blog posts and videos. This interview is in honor of Women’s History Month, which is celebrated in March.

1. How long have you been blogging and what prompted you to begin blogging?

In 2021 I started VALENCIARTIST, and I love blogging. I was prompted by my desire to communicate (as a Gemini male) and to inform about art and artists and as well introduce my poetry.

2. What are your favorite topics to blog about?

I dedicate my blog to writing about art, teaching about art, and talking about artists, musicians and my poetry. I don’t hold back, I tell it like I see it, like I think it and I proffer my opinions candidly.

3. From your blog, we can see that in addition to being an artist, you are also a composer, a poet, and a videographer. Do you have a preferred medium or do you feel that they all feed your muse?

I’ve three preferred mediums: The written word, the painted image, and the composed (or improvised) music. I am not a trained composer or videographer. My professional training in art (and medicine) is at the University level, but I have learned much more in the real world and I am still learning every day. I’m not too up for universities these days. They seem more like centres of indoctrination than centres of learning. I think you can learn all you need without some professor telling you that what he/she thinks is what you should know. I advocate learning our own truth.

4. Your blog often focuses on female artists in many mediums. Why do you choose to champion women artists? Do you have favorites among the women that you have shared to date?

I don’t like to see artists, just because they are women, to be considered inferior to men. And for a long time art history thought just that. In some instances they even rubbed the signature and replaced it with the name of a male artist. I think art should be valued for its merits and not by the gender of the person who created it. I noticed that there were many great women artists that I was never introduced to by professors at the U (thus my dislike for institutions of “higher learning”) and I began to explore, to learn, to search. As a result, I now have many favourites among the women artists that were never spoken about. My number one would be Louise Bourgeois, the French sculptor who created “Maman” the huge, incredible spider that has travelled the world, museum by museum.

5. How did you get into being an artist?

I’ve always loved art. I think my inclination towards the art was a gift from God and I realised that I had to do something worthy with it. I am still trying. My work is to please God, and then, hopefully, the rest of us, including myself.

6. You have lived in both the United States and now in Valencia. What do you like the best and the least about each of these locations?

I’ve lived in many other places as well. I feel that each place, each geographical position on the Earth that I have lived in, has given me something of the knowledge of the Earth and has helped me to dispel the lies of this world. The United States offered me many opportunities. It is a country of immigrants that has been made great by what these immigrants have done, so I understood its reason for existing and I felt at home there. I did not arrive as an immigrant, as I was a child, but I grew up in a very interesting time and in a very interesting place. Valencia, well Spain, is my home. I am not from this community as my family, and heritage, are from the north, Asturias and Navarra, but I feel at home here and I love the weather.

7. Where do you see yourself in the next 5-10 years? Do you have any new frontiers that you would like to conquer?

Conquering each day, realising it is a new world, a new universe, every time I open my eyes in the morning. I plan to continue to write, to paint, to create videos for learning and teaching and to blog. I also want to do a little bit more travelling to places I have been wanting to go like Egypt to see the pyramids and to Israel, which is one of the countries I admire the most.

8. For people that may not be familiar with your blog, please define JaZzArt for us.

Jazz is a form, a genre of music which conforms to three main principles: One, that the player is also composer as he improvise; Two, improvisation; Three, that it must “swing”, or in other words have rhythm. I apply these three to my art.

9. What is the role of art in society?

Art is a means of expression. It is a language. In society we are faced with multitudes of problems and most of them are expressed through reports in the news and resolved by our institutions and by our political representatives or leaders. Art seeks to also solve problems but in different ways. Art appeals to our senses, to our taste, to our beliefs and to our worldview. Art can be expressive, decorative, rebellious but it must always remain as subterfuge for it lies below the surface for the majority of the people.

10. What else would you like to share with us?

I strongly believe that artists have a social and spiritual responsibility, whether they realise it or believe it. Therefore an artist must speak out against injustices, against political corruption, against unfair practices and other ills of society that we see reported everyday in the television/online news. I have chosen many battles to engage with. One is the fact that women artists are being discriminated and I want to see that end. Art is the product, the hard work, of the artist and it is what holds value, not the
makes.