The Late Concha Garcia Zaera: The Granny That Used MS Paint as Her Painting Board

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It's too bad that I learned of this fabulous old lady, only after she died of old age in 2023. It was in 2004 that she enrolled in art school and was gifted a computer. It's strange but true that this old lady managed to learn to use the PC. Not only that, she used MS Paint in such a way that had my mind blown. I personally stopped using MS Paint when Adobe Photoshop (which I no longer use now) came. Today, I use Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer to compensate my lack of painting skills. 

The This is Glamorous Website gives the story of the old lady last 2018:

We came across one such discovery recently, happening upon it in the local newspaper. The account belongs to Concha García Zaera: @conchagzaera, whose profiles says “Soy una señora de 88 años. Me gusta pintar con el programa Paint. Y sobre todo estar con mi familia y con mis amigas.” / I am an 88 year old lady. I like to paint with the Paint program. And above all be with my family and with my friends.

Years ago, after her husband passed away, Concha gave up oil painting. Her family gave her a PC and she started to explore using Microsoft Paint as a way to pass the time. Paint is a notoriously difficult program to master and produces a very specific renderings. Over the years, the grandmother persevered, and has been able to create magical landscapes with incredibly intricate detail using the program on Windows 7, and amazingly, only a mouse as her input. She takes her inspiration from postcards she has collected over the years from friends and family, and local inspiration from Valencia. The pieces can take anywhere from two weeks to a month to complete.

For a long time, her granddaughters tried to persuade her to open an Instagram account to share her work, but she always refused. One of her granddaughters opened one for her, and her artwork quickly went viral, amassing over 150k followers.

Concha has become something of an internet celebrity not only in her native Valencia, but also all over Spain, and has even received an honour from the city. So much so, that she now spends a part of her days charmingly responding to fans of her work on social media, proving you’re never too old to learn something new.

It's a shame, really, that not so many old people bothered to learn basic usage of a computer. This old woman's exploration of MS Paint, a program that I stopped using due to its lack of layers. However, I'm amazed that this old lady wasn't using a pen but a mouse. But it would've been interesting if she used a pen and a tablet, though.

Just a sample, picture of lola (grandmother) is actually the late Ester Chavez

Regardless, I decided to write this in memory of my late paternal grandmother, as it's her 108th birthday today.