Jennifer Lopez Invited Artist Who Painted Her Portrait Backstage For a Meet & Greet at Madrid Show: ‘Dream Come True’

They say don’t meet your heroes. But if you have just spent nine hours painting a shockingly life-like portrait of one of the biggest pop stars in the world and she summons you backstage to meet her while praising your brushwork, well, maybe that old saying doesn’t apply to you.

Just ask Madrid, Spain-based artist Esther Moya González, who chronicled her painstaking portrait painting effort to capture Jennifer Lopez outside the singer’s concert at Movistar Arena in Madrid, Spain on Saturday (July 12). As she typically does, González arrived way early and set up her easel outside the venue and, she said, after some of JLo’s dancers spotted her handiwork, she set out to find the singer’s tour manager to see if she could deliver her finished piece to Lopez.

In an Instagram post, González showed off the life-like rendering of Lopez gazing over her shoulder with a sultry look, chronicling the half-day she spent working it up, from the first sketched outlines through the finished product and her up-close view of the show from the floor of the arena.

In another post she labeled “a dream come true,” an off-camera member of Lopez’s crew informs González that the singer is just on the other side of a backstage door as the artist holds up her finished canvas and covers her mouth in shock. “This is very heavy,” she says in shock as she recounts the nine hours she spent on the piece and her excitement to be ushered backstage afterwards for a meet-and-greet.

Flustered, González waits anxiously, shaking with anticipation and unsure how she’s going to react when they meet. Cut to Lopez, wearing a sparkly purple crop top and low rise jeans standing next to the painting and saying, “It is so good! Wow. I’ve seen paintings of myself that are not good. This is amazing.” González squeals with delight at the praise and, in a post-meeting video, cries while recounting all the people who helped make her dream come true. Lopez later shared the painter’s video, and the clip of their meet cute, on her Instagram story.

In addition to her other non-celeb portraits, González has made her “in line” concert queue paintings a thing, including previous portraits of Karol G, Young Miko, Nicky Jam, Dua Lipa, Maluma, Ozuna, Carin Leon and many other Latin music stars.

Lopez launched her Up All Night overseas tour in Vigo, Spain on July 8 and will be on the road across Europe through an Aug. 10 show at Central Stadium in Almaty, Kazakhstan.