On Interdisciplinary Art: Methods & Media

This is a travel sketch I wrote about my time living in Seville, as an assignment for a travel writing class.

This is a collection of Kodachrome still slides from the Parque María Luísa. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. This is a box of old film, intaglio prints, and little blocks of linoleum, those that are carved smoothly with a knife and pressed in ink to render an image. When I press my ear close, I can hear running water, rushing from the background (allá) and chirping parrots imported from Argentina.

This one is a shadow of a single date palm branch. It seems almost too graphic to be a photograph, but at its course edges the tips begin to simmer into the foreground. We can see no part of the tree but three millimeters of sweeping palm frond pushing itself into the extreme background. It’s a sudden beat of rigid parallels; like a Kandinsky painting, the palm frond shadow gives itself to the rigid sweeping motion of a rectangular reflecting pool. The palm shadow is the counter piece. I can’t tell if it’s a print or a photograph. 

Here’s one of a blooming hibiscus bush and an antique orange Fiat with a sunroof. This one is original yet familiar. It has precedents, with bougainvillea bushes, old cars, and blue doors. This one lacks a clear sense of grandeur; the wheels are cut out of the frame, it was taken quickly. It lends it a sense of action, and the image shudders with shivering motion. 

Three palm trees on this panel. Their stair-step level heads tell us they’re in perspective, but they’re ungrounded, and could continue downward forever. It’s tricolor, almost a four color composition—either a Kodachrome or a reduction print, mounted the same so I can’t tell—but so tricolor that I almost feel them melting into a black and white silhouette. Navy blue, almost black; the whisper of an edgy, dusty green; orange; a breathless blue, almost white. The colors are labels of light, reflections of the sun out of frame on which everything depends. The orange is the slender fingers of the palm fronds, the navy constructing the heavy trunks and abstract shadows of the actual palm of the leaf. I read them like hands: navy is the palm, Rorschach ink blots that cloud life and heart lines. The green, the fingers. Slender orange finger trips disappear into the sun-drenched sky.

Lots of these unplaceable prints/Kodachrome stills in the box. Shoebox. Ibercaja. That’s the name of a bank; it means “Iberian box.” A shot from the middle of a crosswalk peeks down an alleyway to an out-of-place apartment complex, a Sarasota Modern outlier. It’s all angles and lattice, marked by a date palm, hiding early winter sun behind its upper floors. 

A stationary moped man, in red that matches his moped.

A woman in a hot pink hijab blooms like a camellia, waiting at the bus stop. 

In this box there’s a persisting continuity—all detached, no clear sense of up or down. The view upon which we look is skewed; our perspective not just shifted but completely disregarded.

Here’s another, the corner of a white house with yellow shutters at high contrast with silhouettes and lanky shadows of two Chilean wine palms hiding the sun.

Or how about this one: the flat face of a white building with yellow trim, two yellow spires piercing a tranquil manganese sky. One window is draped with a turquoise awning. Across the frame the seed pods of a Chinese persimmon are lanky downward-pointing fingers that suggest frozen fingertips in the winter sun.

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Marching up the street past a Starbucks, El Archivo de Indias, and hordes of tourists, I can see the Cathedral, and as I’m perpendicular to it, it is flat, its Gothic spires two-dimensional as paper snowflakes cut out of the gray sky. It reminds me of Roman city planning, and though it is beautiful, it probably takes away from the full effect of its glory that it appears as flat as a piece of cardboard as you approach.

Today is one of the few gray days we’ve had here in Seville, a depressing alternative to its usual brilliant fauve landscapes. I cannot stop seeing this city in two contexts: an artistic one, and a religious one. Hay aquí mucho catolicismo, y nada de religión, goes that Ezra Pound poem; here there is much catholicism, and no religion. I think of him staring at the stars through the hole in his tent, imprisoned outside in the Colosseum in Rome after supporting Mussolini. I find it harder to not be religious when basking in this great and glorious beauty. 

Aquinas says that one’s existence as a part of a whole, substantiating itself, is intrinsic to existence as a corrupted being. Summa Theologica says “…everything, by its natural appetite and love, loves its own proper good because of the common good of the whole universe, which is God.” (Aquinas, 984). “God leads everything to the love of Himself.” Even our desire to pursue and love God is tainted by the corrosive motive of self-interest. What to make of that?

It goes on, but that part reminded me so much of my Seville bible study. Summa Theologica references to original sin, laying the foundation for the need for modern salvation. The fault in my Christianity is my Methodist impulse to rationalize, and there are so many logical inconsistencies that caused me to drift in and out of belief for several years. I joined a bilingual Bible study in Seville for the community; little did I realize I’d rediscover religion in the faded out blue room of Iglesia Dios es Amor, a little church I rode the metro to on Wednesdays and Sundays. 

We’d covered paradox in the study before (la paradoja), but now the question our pastor, a young, fit guy fresh out of seminary named Kyle, posed was “Can a person rationally believe in paradoxical doctrine?” We debated in small groups, occasionally standing to grab bread and sweet, ripe tomatoes Kyle's wife had brought for the group. We tossed around phrases like “divine incomprehensibility” and discussed the divine sources of Christian doctrines; on the whole it was brilliantly inconclusive and productively frustrating. Finally, Kyle ended us with a question to mull over for next week: “If divine incomprehensibility gives us reason to think that some of our theorizing might be enduringly paradoxical, doesn’t that suggest that the paradoxes at the heart of the Trinity and the incarnation might be real?” 

I theorize too hard on the metro back to the city center, and by the time we’re sipping icy glasses of tinto de verano, my sweet American friend stops me. “Is it not enough to just have faith sometimes?” I hadn’t thought about it that way, had never let myself be consoled by the thought of endless grace. Thinking back on it now with  Aquinas in mind, I am relieved; I would rather be broken contributing to the greater good of the universe than hovering indifferently above, perfect and uncorrupted. This is the human spirit, to strive to glorify God, and if that makes us corrupted beings, then I’ve found peace with that. I long to be a part of this whole of corruption striving for glorification. 

I’m now standing in El Archivo de Indias after my last exam on my final day in this beautiful place. I’ve just created a life here, made some friends, grown some roots. The exhibit is in honor of the 500th anniversary of the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan, the craziest of all the conquistadors, the one that sailed around the entire world. The end of the exhibit has one unattributed quotation: The passage of this ship was the most novel occurrence since God created man. What is it about being here, at the very beginning of it all? Standing where he stood, where he kicked them off the stone bulkhead, headed to explore the frontier? The very last paradigmal shift?

In search of a trade route…our AP history teachers drilled into our heads: In search of God, gold, and glory. 

I live in gold. 

I find God. 

Despite the corruption of my being, I am glorious. 

The Mallorca of Miró

I’ve been waiting to add the Taller Sert into my repertoire of modern art museums for years—starting with the Fundació Miró in Barcelona in 2010 and 2016, plus the Fondation Maeght in 2014 and 2016, the last of Josep Lluís Sert’s major famous modern art museums in Europe to tick off my list was the Taller Sert, Joan Miró studio in Palma de Mallorca. My host family laughed when I told them I was going to Mallorca, and my host dad just shook his head and said, “Palma de Mallorca: rich people, bad drugs, shit music.” What they didn’t realize was that I hadn’t come for the clubbing, the drugs, or the flashing lights, but to experience Mallorca the way Catalán-born Miró and Sert had. Not only did I want to see the studio that Sert had crafted for his friend, but I also wanted to experience the Mallorca that cured Miró’s depression. With a ticket that left Seville at sunrise, an itinerary with just one thing planned, and an easygoing, adventurous travel companion, I was ready to visit the Mallorca of Miró.

My first impression of the island was from the air. Blinking open bleary eyes as we passed over Menorca, I found that Mallorca wasn’t quite the size I’d expected—in fact, it was nothing near my expectation. I’’ve grown up vacationing on Gulf Coast barrier islands, and spent my last summer on an East Coast island the size of a bread crumb, so it was stunning to circle over an island that kicked up mountains from its coastline, an island that couldn’t capture both coasts in one aerial photograph. One reason Miró loved Mallorca so much was because here he enjoyed relative anonymity, and was widely known as the husband of his popular Mallorquina wife—but Pilar must have been one vivacious character of a woman, because it takes at least an hour and a half to travel by car from one coast to the other. 

The one detail that has always stood out to me is that for Miró, living and working on Mallorca cured his depression. And while artists have taken up residence to stave off physical illness (Paul Gaugin and his Tahitian women, for example), it’s interesting to note how seriously Miró and his family took the state of his mental health, especially during a time when that aspect of health wasn’t widely acknowledged. Miró was depressed and unproductive in Paris and Barcelona, and Mallorca cured him. It remains sunny and warm year-round, but that’s true of many places around the world (the South Pacific, the Caribbean, Corsica, Sardinia, and the Côte d’Azur all come to mind), but clearly I was missing something, the undefinable x factor that made Mallorca special. That was what I wanted to discover.

Speeding down a graphite line of a country road on a vespa, the cross wind tussling my sundress and tossing my hair over my bare shoulder, I thought about how lucky I was to be here. Rich beauty always reminds me of why this life is worth living—it’s easy to see how Mallorca, with its sun-drenched olive orchards, brilliant pink oleander bushes, and cliffs that end in pure cerulean salt water, cured Miró’s depression. How could one ever paint in a cramped, gray Paris apartment, when warm wind and air fragrant with the honey of cactus pears exists on Mallorca? The landscape is straight out of a Fauvist painting, and easily reduces itself into thick lines of warm color. Its beauty not bound by any physical laws of nature, the Mallorcan countryside quickly becomes the thick swaths of color and swirling orbs of a Miró mural. 

Visiting the Taller Sert was another experience entirely. A small studio etched into a cliffside overlooking the Mediterranean, rising out of thick oleander bushes and shaded by umbrella pines, it is a breath of fresh air in what is now a heavily developed vacation area, dead in early November. We visited right at opening time on Sunday morning. It was a silent, peaceful morning with Miró, and in the bright cloudless sky, the studio could show off the Sert trademarks that made it famous. 

Of course the Mediterranean is an ideal climate for inspiration, but I’d never been enough a student of art to understand why Sert’s light wells were important beyond their aesthetic—like a snake, I love basking in bright white light, so I didn’t understand their significance. But in drawing, direct light that shines perpendicular to a canvas will generate a graphite glare, making it difficult to accurately determine proportions and realistically blend. Direct light must shine directly downward, parallel with the page, in order to eliminate that glare, or else be refracted to give the studio a soft, ambient glow. The light wells make sense from an aesthetic standpoint, but from an artistic one as well—and in the Mediterranean climate, the light wells lengthen the working day for an artist (not to mention the aspect of preservation for art—canvases are sensitive to bright light, hence why you’re constantly being heckled about flash photography in museums).

We passed cases of Miró’s trinkets and curios, an eclectic mix of primitive art icons, foreign coins, and postcards, and as we rounded a corner the bright Mediterranean light, refracted by the light wells in the ceiling, was decanted to lend the studio a bright (but not harsh) appearance. The Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró spent countless hours in restoration trying to abide by Miró’s wishes for the studio—to be left alone, exactly as he left it when he died—while also preserving its priceless provenance (the art, the studio itself, and the legacy). Therefore, the canvases on easels and unfinished paintings stacked along the walls aren’t originals, but careful copies, and the splatters and smears of paint, not to mention the palette, are completely original. It was more of a religious experience than visiting a cathedral; like a pilgrimage of modern art, it felt like I had arrived at spiritual enlightenment and bliss, and if not that, at least I knew something. Visiting one of the first premier works in Sert’s oeuvre was more than deeply satisfying, more than just an enrichment of knowledge. I had seen the masterpieces. Likewise, I had seen the developed and perfected museums of Sert that were the centerpiece wedding cakes of the Modernist and Rationalist movements. But now I had arrived at their birthplace, their origin of conception. 

It was hard to part from the Taller Sert, where the interior corridors are tagged with Miró’s graffiti that would one day become his masterpiece Labyrinth, where the art and the building are as Mediterranean as the azure seas and the oleander bushes outside blowing in the wind. It felt almost like a betrayal to turn my back on it, to walk away. Once you’ve visited a place the first time, it’s easy enough to imagine that one day you’ll again return. I was misty-eyed as we buckled up our helmets, climbed on our vespas, and motored back across the island, but grinned as we cruised past the port on that cloudless blue day in Mallorca. I finally understood. I finally knew Miró.

Light Study II

Light Study: Triana in the Morning. 20 November 2019.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a single-tone drawing, not since my ink drawings that made my final project for a drawing class last spring. But today, Seville is not the gleaming Technicolor city it is always advertised to be, for once spitting drizzly rain from a one-dimensional gray sky. I have a new tube of Sennelier Ivory Black; the other day, I tested out its tones by squeezing it into a fresh palette and sweeping it down the pages of my sketchbook. Today the city is wearing the different hues of ivory black as a veil. 

I am always impatient to start painting new colors every time I get them, so after visiting Paris I now have daubs of paint, careful gradations of tone, peppering my sketchbook pages like a wallpaper of Pantone chips. My drawing teacher, Nick, always called the most heavily pigmented tones “ones,” making the lightest tones “tens,” so light that there’s almost no color to them at all. Usually, Seville is a palette these stark one tones, like throbbing intertwined heartbeats: Sennelier Yellow Light, Sennelier Red, Opera Rose, Phthalo Blue. But today Phthalo Blue is dampened from a one to a five, and I’m only seeing a tint of Sennelier Red. I remember driving through Los Pueblos Blancos, the White Villages, with a couple of friends earlier in the semester. My photographer friend lamented what a shame it was that it was a cloudy weekend, that the white villages would photograph much more beautifully in the sun. I squint now at a white facade in the dreary, overcast light. I have to disagree with her. The contrast between the blue and the white may not exist, but now the color is more complex, a seven or eight tone of French Ultramarine with the slightest tint of Ivory Black. Maybe even a tint of Forest Green—it’s a complex color in this light that’s hard to pinpoint. 

One particular building catches my eye, and I sit to study it for a minute on a slightly damp bench. It’s easy to imagine that this building could easily blend with the sky. Divided into three floors by balconies and windows, the top floor is painted a three tone of Phthalo Blue, the middle floor a five tone, and the bottom floor a seven tone, which would blend into the sky now if it was set against it. It was a subtle transition: if you weren’t looking for it, you’d likely miss it. It makes me think of the interior stairwell at Casa Batlló in Barcelona; the architect Antoni Gaudi employs the same visual trick, tiling the upper levels with dark blue Ultramarine tiles (one tones) that decrease in pigmentation as they descend, until the blue nine-tone tiles are in an interlocking mosaic with white tile. It creates an illusion of unity of light; even though the upper corridors have more light because they’re closer to the skylight from the roof terrace, they appear to have the same amount of light as the lower floors. Same visual trick is employed here in Triana, and because this building faces East over the river, I understand why it’s being used. On a sunny day it receives direct sunlight, starting directly perpendicular and shining straight onto the facade, while at midday the sun is shining straight overhead, giving the same problem of light that Gaudi had with the interior stairwell back in Barcelona. Because of its tonal gradation, the building appears to be the same color throughout the entire day, even into sunset, when the bottom floor would be swathed in broody shadow. But it’s painted lighter, and it’s not, taking on the same hue as the upper floors. 

It’s later now. We’re in our third day of rain. I try to paint the sky but I can’t  quite nail down the color. My recent obsession is color theory; from fresh tubes and gummy pans of paint I paint long, sweeping tonal gradations through the white pages of my sketchbook, studying the different ways the color behaves. It’s like a sociological experiment, watching the pigment particles granulate like powder, or melt into the page  like velvet.

It’s hard to say that the sky is simply gray. I think about the tonal gradation of French ultramarine, a warm, vivid blue with a reddish tint. Squeezing it from the tube, it’s hard to imagine that there’s any red here—it appears to be blue in its purest primary form. French ultramarine is the color of the sky, not the vivid pigment squeezed straight from the tube but as the end of a miles-long tonal gradation, a warm, transparent red tint to the sky giving the day a glow.  My mom always called this “storm light.” Storm light isn’t the classical bright and cheerful sunlight of a normal day here, but still bathes the city in a certain warm glow that only a vivid blue could shine.