February 19, 2006
Between Burgos and Bilbao

Last Thursday (02/09/06) I left Pont Aven with the students and the other Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art (PSCA) professors. Driving through the country side on the way to Brest the vistas were beautiful, with long views at times down to fingers of land jutting into the ocean. A note on the modern French landscape: what is exciting and apparent after even a short time in France is the difference in industrial architecture. The shapes of new buildings, whether factories or commercial centers, is livelier and more elegant than your typical functional buildings built recently in the U.S. Corrugated metal siding might be painted with saturated blues, greens or reds, or glass and steel skins might be slipped over 5 story buildings whose interiors are visible as one passes. Signage is everywhere, large and noisy, so that as one drives through the outskirts of any French town, the commercial centers scream their wares in a way reminiscent of market callers. I could do without the signs, but a typical countryside factory that produces simple cans of sardines (Filet Bleu outside of Quimper, for example) can be beautiful, and French builders seem to have taken this to heart.

I took my painting/drawing class to the covered parking area outside a large supermarket in Quimperle. The multi-vaulted structure on gently curving steel posts was a clear example of contemporary utilitarian architecture that with a little thinking, connects dots all the way back to gothic and romanesque churches and their forests of columns and vaults. I did a walnut ink drawing in my sketchbook, not very good, I would like to go back to draw there again.

We flew from Brest to Lyons, and then from Lyons to Madrid. The flights were beautiful. On the first leg we passed over the jagged southern cost of Brittany, saw the salt flats at Guerande, the gulf of Morbihan, the city of Nantes at the mouth of the Loire River, all so well organized from 20,000,’ after which the plane turned east and all of France was covered in clouds. Snow was on the ground in Lyons, and the elegant airport contains a beautiful with a new structure by Calatrava that seems to soar. It was truly stunning. (Later in the trip we saw an older Calatrava addition at the airort in Bilbao).

Arriving in Madrid encompassed taking three subways to get to our hotel, a perfectly fine two star that faces the train station on one side and the Reina Sofia Museum on the other. The neighborhood (metro Atocha) is convenient to the big museums, but not very beautiful. Greasy spoon food counters and brightly lit restaurants without much character line the streets nearby, but not far away in narrower streets on the other side of Calle Atocha there are wonderful small cafes and bars filled with young people and often offering backdrops for local musicians.

The first evening we walked to two galleries near by, on Calle Alameda, one that is more of a publicly funded art space, the other commercial, both with shows that engendered more discussion than they were worth. Then a fifteen minute walk to the Plaza Major, a beautiful, if stark, grand square, surrounded by red faced buildings with large rectangular windows and barrel vaulted archways leading into the square and back out to the city beyond. All the way around at street level there is a covered arcade, and on one side two towers poke beyond the roof line and frame a section of the buildings where the façade is covered with figurative paintings. On our last morning in Madrid I came to this square again, and sat for an hour or so and painted a watercolor in one of my Fabriano sketchbooks.

Slightly off the square to the southwest we found a wonderful restaurant open for hundreds of years, where notables such as Hemmingway ate. Some of the students split off, feeling the fare too pricey for a first night, but the rest of the band marched right on in and ate a wonderful meal on the third floor. Each floor contained one or more dinning rooms, and these are lined with wood paneling and painted tiles. The painted tiles were either abstract, suggesting a Moorish past, or as in our room, were painted with figures in 18th century dress in blue and white, reminding me of my mother’s Spanish dishes. The room, was over lit by American standards. I had an appetizer of blood sausage (rice is mixed in unlike in France, and though it is lighter in texture than French boudin noir, it is far greasier), and stuffed squid cooked in squid ink for a main dish. The most impressive meal was eaten by Kelly, one of the students, who ordered a roast leg of lamb, and was served a crunchy crusty leg that was enough for four. Sangria and water were the accompanying libations. The Sangria in Spain contains little alcohol, and is refreshing more than anything else.

After dinner a group of us went to see flamenco. At first we found a nearby bar with a 30 Euro cover, a bit much for any of us. Nearby, however, was a bar with 7 flamenco dancers, 2 men and 5 women, and the cover, 9 euros, included one drink. The place was pretty empty, but the dancers were having a grand time, yuking it up, and, though there was no live music, they were doing a lot of clapping and it all seemed good to me.

The next day was for a visit to ARCO, an immense contemporary art fair in an immense convention center outside the city. I use the word immense twice because that is the only appropriate adjective: over 200,000 people were to visit the fair in 5 days, and in a full 8 hours I was only able to visit perhaps a third of the fair. Also, the two halls that housed our event were numbered 7 and 9 out of perhaps a dozen. The other halls of the convention center housed other conventions. In fact, a second fair, the Madrid – Moda (fashion) seemed far larger than the contemporary art fair. It certainly felt like we were at an “Event.” Inside, the fair was of very good quality, and not at all dominated by US galleries. Some of the art I liked, some I didn’t which is pretty much the way it goes for this kind of fair, but in general the quality was very good and their was great variety of objects and approaches to consider. At one point I sat on the ground and made some watercolors of a painting I liked by a Portuguese artist named Fatima Mendonca. She shows with the Galeria111 in Lisbon. The dealer, Rui Brito and Fatima, came out to meet me and take digital photos of my drawings. I then went into the booth (the painting, of a female matador’s shoes, was hanging outside the booth) and looked at a catalogue of Mendonca's work. I would like to order it from the gallery when I return to Pont Aven. In summary, some of the work I saw at ARCO was really inspiring, and even more so for the students. The fair itself was overwhelming, with so many galleries and good artists that from time to time I felt frustrated and insignificant as an artist, a feeling that I know many artists feel when confronted with the enormity of the art world.

I also met an artist from Mexico, Eric Beltran, whose printing projects were highlighted here by an artist book of silhouette stamps made from very thin linoleum. The images come from the daily papers. He has made hundreds of stamps in this way, collecting and transforming throw-away images into art. The bound volume contained around 200 pages, in an edition of 15. I bought one from the gallery but I still have to pay for it. Beltran made this project while at a two year residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. I talked to him, as well as Robbert Jan Blekemolen, the director of the residency, about Philagraphica, and our great plans for 2010. Blekemolen was at the IMPACT conference, and knew about Philagraphica.

I think Beltran would be a wonderful person to have do a project specific for Philagraphica. He has already done very large projects in Italy, Mexico and the Netherlands. In Italy, he covered a series of streets with sheets printed with the word “Lies” in Italian. In one project in Holland he convinced a newspaper in Amsterdam to leave out the letter “U” in the entirety of an edition; in a second project he asked volunteers to tell a lie, and then quickly printed the “lie” and spread it around a large art institution with the idea that the printed lie somehow becomes the truth. Each project is thought provoking, and expands our notion of what a printmaking artist does.


(From a desk back in rainy Pont Aven)

That evening we ate dinner at another over-lit restaurant, this one with little décor to recommend it -- (it would have felt at home in Penn station) -- that specialized in paella. The paella’s were individual, ordered like European pizzas, one with fish, one with chicken, etc., and were tasty if not at all the incredible paella that Vincent and I ate years ago in Barcelona when we visited the my parents’ former neighbors the Pisunyes’. After dinner, I went with a small group to a local bar, where we arrived just a the end of what seemed to be a spontaneous sing-a-long, Spanish style. One guy was playing a guitar and singing, while others either sang or clapped or did both. Unfortunately it didn’t last long, and so after a drink we ended up leaving, but not before the bartender told us that the following night there would be a concert with a singer-songwriter and his guitar. I really wanted to go to that.

The next morning I joined Don Schule, the sculpture professor from Penn State, for breakfast (tortilla con patates) and coffee, and then the group walked over to the Prado for a full on day of visiting two of Europe’s most important collections, the Prado and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. What a treat!

This was my third visit to the Prado, so I had an idea of what I wanted to concentrate on, and was aware that the Prado is rather small for a museum of its importance. Even so, the work is of such exceptional quality that it is difficult not to leave the museum with a head swollen to Stendahlian proportions.

The first area I stopped to draw was in a small room containing a handful of Greek and Roman sculptures. One marble in particular, of a reclining female nude partially covered by cloth, was monumental in all ways, and seemed to be a direct link to Picasso’s work and to Matisse’s, and in a lesser way to Maillol's. If they did not see this particular piece, they certainly saw similar works. The figure’s right arm is raised over her tilted head, her right hand dangling down by her neck. Her left arm is by her side with the elbow folded back in so the hands were quite close together near her left breast. Her massive legs were crossed, left under right, covered in cloth, her right knee bent up high. The over all impression was one of strength and solidity, and a fluidity of line that belies the compositions complexity. I couldn't stop staring at this work it was so powerful.

Other Prado highlights included van Eyck’s Descent From the Cross, (wouldn’t it be great if this were in Philadelphia?), Goya’s black paintings, the Zubarans, the Jose de Riberas, the three Boticellis that tell the tale of a marriage arrangement gone sour, the fabulous Velazquez’s (those sad and strong and vulnerable infantas) and all those El Greco’s, a beautiful Rafael, and of course Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. But one of the biggest surprises for me were the Rubens, in particular a room filled with 8 or so portraits of saints. These portraits had the same kind of monumental presence as the roman marble. Each strong and independent face was framed by saturated frocks, flowing hair and deep dark backgrounds that reinforced the solidity of the forms. I was really blown away, and spent a while doing a sketch from one of the pictures, trying to get the well articulated volumes down. Other Rubens (is there ever an end to Rubens?) in an adjoining room were again full of massive figures that gave weight to the allegories and myths depicted. I am looking forward to seeing more in Berlin and Paris when we get there.

By the time I left, around 3:30, I was exhausted, but we were moving on to the Thyssen-Bornemisza, and in particular the collection of 19th century French art, especially the Gauguins. This is a rather weak part of the collection, not really worth the bother when the rest of the collection is often so strong, but it tied in perfectly with the students art history program back in Pont Aven. Elsewhere in the T.B., paintings from German expressionist artists were wonderful to look at, as was the collection of renaissance and northern Euopean masters including a perfect painting of a young girl in elegant dress by Ghirlandaio.

That night was the weekly school dinner, and we all went to an early (by Sapnish standards) dinner at a local restaurant. Not really very good, as is usually the case with group meals, as the restaurant tries to limit the choices to a few ordinary dishes. Again a small group, Don, Carine (the French professor who also was in charge of the trip’s organization), and two or three students, went back to the small bar from the night before and were treated to a wonderful small concert by a singer song writer who at one point invited a drummer up to play along. The atmosphere was full of mirth, and the little tiny underground cave was filled to the brim. We sat on small low stools, so it was a good thing the music was wonderful. A note about Carine: She was wonderful in planning our trip in advance, and taking care of any and all problems that arose once in Spain. All our trips should be so well run!!

The following day consisted of a visit to the Reina Sofia Museum of Contemporary Art, right next to the hotel, where we first gathered for a talk and discussion in front of Picasso’s Guernica. Can it get any better? That is one great painting, it has everything: form, monumentality, beautiful paint, temporal politics, and a sense of the classic. And it makes you think. It is preceded by a room filled with drawn and painted studies Picasso made in preparation for the Guernica, and followed by a room filled with several paintings and pictures from the years following. Not a large collection of Picasso’s work, if you have been to the MOMA or the Picasso Museum in Paris you have seen larger quantities, but, like in the Prado, the work shown was very very good, and really helped me to understand the making of the Guernica in a new way.

Unfortunately, not so for the rest of the museum. There were highlights, of course, but What remains in my head several days after the visit, is the building itself, its beautiful windowed perambulatory around a large open courtyard filled with green plants and a few choice sculptures, and the white generously proportioned rooms that ring this hallway, with their high ceilings and white walls, any two of which equal in size the amount of space devoted to contemporary art in most cities, and here there were two floors of exhibition space. The museum’s café was another wonderful space, designed by Jean Nouvel – a large room filled with people at tables and sitting or standing at counters beneath a free form burgundy enamel ceiling that draws out the energy of the crowd from the depths of the restaurant areas and pushes it into the city through a large glass enclosed courtyard. A must see (and actually they serve great sandwiches and coffee) next time you are in Madrid.

The rest of the day we were on our own, and I decided to spend the time walking around, as I had a feeling that if I didn’t discover some wonderful neighborhood soon in Madrid I would always have a mediocre impression of the city other than the art and one large square. I walked up through the neighborhood adjacent to our hotel, on the other side of Calle Atocha, and found a great pedestrian street (Calle las Huertas), lined with small cafes and restaurants, and some beautiful historic buildings. It was just fun to be there. Then I reached the Puerta del Sol, a large city square filled with noise and traffic and lots of people walking around. Fun and interesting, but not beautiful. From there I crossed the Calle de Alcala and walked up the hill to the city’s gay neighborhood around the Plaza de Chueca. This neighborhood had many small restaurants, bars, and at least three gay bookstores – always a good sign for a city’s gay and lesbian population. It was about 4pm, so I spent about an hour drawing in Chueca Square, sitting on the ground. A drunk seemed to say that I was on his stoop, so I moved across the square, and he started to follow me, a new extremely large beer in hand, when he got distracted and started to talk to someone else. I was approached by some children, who wanted me to paint their portraits, which I didn't, as I was cold and wanted to finish the watercolor I had started, before getting a coffee in a local café. The cafe was again full of jazzy and campy energy, and though I had know idea what anyone was saying, it seemed like the community was alive and well. The Pont Aven group was due to meet back at the hotel for a discussion of art in Madrid, so I left after my coffee and raced back through the streets of a neighborhood named noticing very swank establishments that I had not seen on the way over. So beautiful hotels and restaurants with very up to date design gave me a new impression of Madrid as a city that has chic ambient light as well as over-lit places to eat.

Back at the hotel our groups pow-wow had everyone excited about what they had seen, what art they discovered, what ideas they were returning to Pont Aven with, and we split up into smaller groups for dinner. I dragged a group to that pedestrian street where I had seen a very cozy wood paneled place earlier in the afternoon, but alas it was closed. On a nearby square, Plaza St. Ana, facing an old theater (Teatro Espanol) we found a cervesaria – or restaurant that serves its own home made beer. Carine Caroline and I split several dishes of tapas. Afterwards, Carine, Don, myself and some students were once again on the search for flamenco, and after several false starts ended up at The Bourbon Cafe, watching the last forty minutes of a rather old singer belt it out in that beautiful haunting flamenco way accompanied by a younger guitarist who seemed to be following the singer's lead. It was magic, and as I thought of words like “Extramadura” and “Zaragosa” "calle" and "caliente," it didn't really matter that I didn't really know what those things were, just that they all seemed to be connected somehow to this cry from the soul of the old guy in the front of the room whose voice seemed to carry with it the all the hopes and dashed dreams of so many.