ABOUT US

We are Penny and Robert Germaux, long time residents of Benahavis, a charming white Spanish village in the hills above the Costa del Sol.

This website is a work in progress, but it will soon be filled with stories from our lives.

If you'd like to be notified of when this site officially launches, please email us at benahavis29679@gmail.com.

Galería Germaux

I arrived in Spain in 1987 and one of the first people I met was a wonderful portrait artist called Barbara Nichols.  She was American and had arrived here the same time as I did, via London where she had lived for 20 years making a living painting the rich and famous.   I remember going to her house near Estepona and being fascinated by the amount of paintings hanging on the walls.  I told her rather wistfully  that I wished I could paint and she immediately said that I could and that she would teach me.  Our friendship and painting classes lasted nearly 20 years until her death 4 years ago at the respectable age of 86. (she had been a committed smoker for 60 years!) Barbara was a marvellous source of inspiration to me and taught me so much.

Last November I decided to use my husband´s office as a studio.  Robert  had been forced to close his real  estate business due to the recession and his office, which is in a very pretty courtyard in the centre of the village of Benahavis ,  was lying empty and looking extremely sad.   I started to paint on a daily basis and people would wander in and look at what I was doing.  One day an artist friend of mine, Miranda, dropped by and asked whether she could join me as she had nowhere to paint. To my astonishment, within a couple of weeks, 10 different painters and sculptors asked whether I could show their work.   Robert and I had never thought of selling art as a business but suddenly we were dealing with customers!

Now Galeria Germaux is truly up and running and Robert has also started to paint.  This helps take his mind off the miserable state of the property market and has opened his eyes to the world of unpredictable and sensitive artists!  One of them invited us to stay at his unfinished farmhouse near Cordoba and we discovered that every piece of sculpture sold at our gallery was helping him to build another wall or buy a new window.

Robert and I love our new profession and look forward to meeting you one day, either in person or virtually, at this blog.

Penny Germaux does  portraits and  takes commissions -see her gallery within ….