The shushing of brush strokes stopped as Nieves Gonz\u00e1lez, painting her latest Baroque-style portrait of a woman in a contemporary puffer jacket, paused to chitchat with a fellow artist in their studio in southern Spain.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re always gossiping,\u201d Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez, her green sweater splattered with paint and her face sparkling with nose studs, said with a laugh.<\/p>\n
A good deal of the chatter in the Spanish art world lately, though, has been about Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez herself. Last year, the British singer Lily Allen plucked Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez, 29, out of the Instagram blue to paint her portrait for her latest album cover. The record, \u201cWest End Girl,\u201d became a hit<\/a>, and so did Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez, whom the newspaper Artnet called \u201can overnight art sensation.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Her image of Ms. Allen, outfitted in a polka-dot puffer jacket, has been viewed millions of times on Spotify, billboards, even on Jimmy Fallon\u2019s late-night desk. In March, the National Portrait Gallery in London unveiled the painting<\/a>, which will hang in the same room as a work by David Hockney, and called her \u201cone of the most compelling voices in figurative painting today.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy dream,\u201d said Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez as she rapidly colored in the crimson puffer coat in her latest work.<\/p>\n Those puffer jackets are typical of Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s work, which feature ethereal or biblical muses sitting regally in natural landscapes that evoke work by the old masters.<\/p>\n She typically subverts that centuries-old aesthetic by dressing her subjects with sumptuous pink, blue and white quilted jackets \u2014 and also imbuing them with more agency and main character energy.<\/p>\n In June, she\u2019ll show her work in Los Angeles<\/a>, but collectors complain that the paintings are already all sold out. Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s Bilbao-based gallerist, Sergio Garc\u00eda, described her trajectory as \u201cvroom, vroom, vrooooom!\u201d<\/p>\n For some, Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s rising star reflects her country\u2019s renewed cultural vibrancy. For others, her use of contemporary puffy couture within a centuries-old Spanish Baroque aesthetic speaks to the negotiation of the past and present. For her friends, what Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez really screams is southern Spanish authenticity.<\/p>\n Energetic and garrulous, she claps with delight over her favorite Andalusian delicacies. As we walked through the streets of Granada, she seemed to know, and to talk to, everyone. She gabbed with friends on street corners, waved hello to the women in the flower shop, the nail salon, the record store.<\/p>\n \u201cIn one year, I\u2019m the queen of the city,\u201d she joked, adding that in reality she was always getting lost.<\/p>\n She sent kisses to her grandfather when he phoned her from back home, and she whispered \u201chashtag contemporary art\u201d in front of touristy art galleries. At one point, she reassuringly called her boyfriend her \u201camor\u201d \u2014 \u201clove\u201d \u2014 after he protested that she teased him too much about resembling a rotund friar featured in a calendar that she had hung in her studio. She said she wanted nothing more than to buy a country house with him outside their small mining hometown, Huelva.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople ask me, \u2018Well what is your goal, to become what?\u2019\u201d she said in her studio. \u201cI think I\u2019ve already achieved my goal, living off my art.\u201d<\/p>\n She stepped back from her canvas to consult an image on an old laptop that she had received on her 18th birthday.<\/p>\n Instead of painting live models or photographs, Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez uses an A.I. system on that laptop to generate composite digital images. These amalgamations are drawn from a combination of baroque portraits, her own sketches and, in her most recent series, catwalk photographs from a fashion show that Herm\u00e8s invited her to in Paris.<\/p>\n Those digital collages, which she calls \u201cFrankensteins,\u201d serve as the inspiration for her painted portraits.<\/p>\n While the models are imaginary, she said, she sometimes sees a trace of her own face in the finished portraits.<\/p>\n Not too long ago, she said, the idea of living off these portraits seemed impossible. \u201cBut here we are,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s like a dream I always had, but times 50.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez was born and raised in a working-class family in Huelva. She started painting early in her childhood, she said, after her mother gave into her pleas and bought her a painting set themed around Vincent Van Gogh\u2019s \u201cSunflowers\u201d series.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know why that day she said yes,\u201d Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez said.<\/p>\n Her favorite color became yellow, \u201cthe favorite of crazies,\u201d she said. At 17, she enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Seville, the city of the artists Diego Vela\u0301zquez and, for a time, Francisco de Zurbara\u0301n, both of whom influenced her greatly. She received a classical painting education and made extra money by selling her portraits to foreigners at a Seville art market and by painting caricatures of guests at weddings in Huelva.<\/p>\n After getting her master\u2019s in art at Seville, she found herself working in a Huelva cosmetics store and wanted out. She had Italian friends and an ear for language, so she gave Italy a try, working as a nanny for \u201ctwo demons\u201d in the country\u2019s north before escaping south to Aquila, where she was ultimately offered a job as a dentist\u2019s assistant. \u201cMe,\u201d she said, \u201cwho knows nothing about teeth.\u201d<\/p>\n She realized that if she could land a job in a foreign land and language doing something she didn\u2019t know anything about, maybe she should return home and take a shot at doing what she did best. She gave herself a year to try becoming a painter.<\/p>\n Back in Huelva, she taught art classes as she worked on portraits. She sketched a copy of a Baroque master\u2019s work in an hour for the inauguration of Huelva\u2019s new museum. Galleries started showing her work. Her Instagram page<\/a>, filled with her portraits, started gaining followers.<\/p>\n Last year, she moved across the region to Granada with her boyfriend, Agus D\u00edaz V\u00e1zquez, also an artist. She usually ate lunch in the dank basement studio, heavy with the scent of paint, with her fellow artists, a jocular crew that enjoyed trouncing her in card games.<\/p>\n One day there, she received an unexpected message.<\/p>\n Leith Clark, the creative director for Ms. Allen\u2019s album, had found Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s page. She forwarded the work to Ms. Allen, including one of a saintly figure in a blue puffer jacket holding a swan, asking what her boss thought.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know when you know,\u201d said Seb Chew, Ms. Allen\u2019s producer and close associate who was involved in the process. \u201cNever seen anything like it before.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Allen\u2019s team reached out to Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez, without mentioning whom they worked for. But the painter was busy with work, didn\u2019t understand what they wanted and ignored the message. Ms. Allen\u2019s team then emphasized that they sought an album cover for a \u201cvery famous person.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez soon connected with Ms. Allen on a video call, took the commission and hunkered down in the studio for weeks, painting to flamenco music. Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez said that Ms. Allen\u2019s team had given her photographs to work from but otherwise relatively little instruction \u2014 trusting her to convey the sense of strength and independence that they were looking for.<\/p>\n Using that creative license, Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez outfitted Ms. Allen in a polka-dot puffer that the musician, in reality, had never worn. Once the album came out, it soon made headlines for lyrics that, the singer has said<\/a>, are laced with details about her split from the American actor David Harbour.<\/p>\n The publicity also paid off for Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez.<\/p>\n Soon, her friends in the studio started poking fun at her resident celebrity status. They began teasing Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez by referring to her as Britney Spears. \u201cOh Britney,\u201d one colleague said whenever Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez complained about all of the new demands on her time.<\/p>\n Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez did not meet the actual pop star, Ms. Allen, in person until last month at the portrait\u2019s official unveiling in London. They hit it off, Ms. Gonz\u00e1lez said, but this time, she held her tongue.<\/p>\n \u201cCan you imagine,\u201d she said, her eyes widening at the possibility, \u201cgossiping with her?\u201d<\/p>\n Carlos Barrag\u00e1n contributed reporting.<\/p>\n