A brush with medicine

If Juan Bautista Nieto had followed his family's ambitions for him, he would be an expert in the art of surgery rather than painting.

The artist trained as a doctor in Seville before throwing in the scalpel to pursue his childhood dream of becoming an artist. It was the right decision. He is now known in Spanish art circles as one of the foremost exponents of his genre today. And the medical training wasn’t wasted. It was his study of anatomy which honed his artistic eye and appreciation of the human form.

Like other hyper-realist artists, Nieto produces very few paintings each year, since each of his large works take between six to nine months to complete. He has an obsession with recreating a reality which reaches beyond the precise representation of a photograph. But instead of a using camera, his tools are oils and acrylic, with airbrush techniques to create multiple tones of light, shadows and density.