Lita Cabellut is one of Spain's most successful artists, but she's barely known in her home country. What's more, the woman whose paintings now sell for six figure sums spent her early years living on the street. "My childhood was like that of thousands of street kids around the world," says Lita Cabellut. She used to roam the streets of Barcelona with other homeless children and slept in the open air.
"We looked after one another - we did whatever we liked. We took coins out of the fountains, begged Zippo lighters from sailors and stole tourists' wallets. We used to go into restaurants and say our father was in the toilet when they served us, before wolfing down the food and running off."
Cabellut was born in a village in Aragon, north-east Spain, in 1961. While she was a baby, she and her mother moved to Barcelona. Her mother ran a brothel in the city and Cabellut was left with her grandmother - but in reality she spent most of her time out on the streets.
"I ran errands for the prostitutes. They gave me money to buy packs of cigarettes, sandwiches, condoms or jewellery, and I kept the change."
Looking back, she says that "art, of course, was there because art is always around us", but she didn't think about it in a formal sense - she was preoccupied with survival.
"A child never recognizes art as something separated. I sold imaginary stars on the streets. Is that not a true performance of art? But for me it was a way to survive."
