Light Study: La Giralda at Noon. Pen and ink on notebook paper. 16 October 2019.
October 16, 2019. There’s no other way to write about the Cathedral here with going about it in sections. It’s the largest in Europe, and excepting the one parallel view you get of it as you approach down the pedestrian street, there is no possible way to view it in its entirety without resorting to a model.
Today’s one of the first real cold days in Seville, and as much as I appreciated the intense, dry heat (a climactic link that reminds me of Al-Andalus’s African heritage), I love a desert winter—so dry it sucks the moisture out of you until your cuticles tear, constant beating sun, clean blue skies pure as water. Today I ironed a crispy white smock and as I sit at the base of the fountain, wind tussles my hair (occasionally spraying me from the fountain) and gently warming my back, as if too much breeze could blow the heat away.
I’m mere feet away from the base of La Giralda, so close I have to crane my neck back so far my head rests between my shoulder blades in order to see the top. Tourists, hordes of them, stand too close to me, so at times they’re blocking my view, my sunshine, or sometimes I catch whiffs of body odor. It’s a melange of gangly, awkward, unaware elbows and armpits, stumbling feet not used to cobblestones, and sharp consonants of foreign languages cutting through the air.
Earlier, I was alone sitting here at the base of the fountain. Now, having broken precedent, it’s packed with people, squeezing in left and right so now I’m back to back with a curly-haired German girl. A muslim girl, the only in her group without a hijab, eats a butter cookie and the crumbs flutter in the wind.
I once mistakenly thought that the scaffolding on La Giralda, the old Muslim medina, would disappear. But after over a month in Spain, I doubt it. They’re glorious, the monuments here, but Europe always seems to be in a constant state of ‘reparation,’ ‘restoration.’ It’s the age-old fight against decay. How much, how long, can you really fight against crumbling brick and cracked, fading Spanish tile roofs, until one day it caves into nothing?
It’s still relatively early, so I know the opposite side of La Giralda is cast in sharp shadows, as I see the darkness from the buttresses cutting the façades from my vantage point. Imitation columns elongated along the porticos, the little Gothic spires gain another face. It’s something I’ve found to be true drawing in India ink rather than just a plain felt tip: that one instance of pure black shadow creates more interest, more expression. It’s the raised eyebrow on a face, a playful smirk—the contrasts of light differentiate the structure in nature from the model, the floor plan, same way depression differentiates a living person from a corpse at peace in a casket.
Ways my drawing has enhanced my writing, and vice versa: I now have a unique perspective on my world. The stone beneath me isn’t just pockmarked and cracked. It has acne scars in the shape of Mexico, running up the step with a trail of scars like a constellation scattered beneath a cheekbone.
(Thank god—as sudden as a flock of Geese, my friends on the fountain have risen and gone, and I am again alone).
I understand the flying buttresses for structural reasons, but to me they’ve always looked like waterslides—another metaphor coined by a parent, probably the first time we visited Notre Dame as a family. Because of my parents I’ll always have visions of Europe in childlike metaphors:
1. Chimera sliding down flying buttresses in the spitting rain
2. Terra-cotta Etruscan icon women with huge curly manes of silvery-green hair dotting the countryside—olive trees,
3. Olive oil is “green gold,” my host father Guillermo told me.
Gold is no longer as valuable as it was in the time of the Spanish conquest. Columbus sailed to America and found heaps of it; Renaissance cathedrals drip gold because it was the most valuable thing on the planet, and therefore fit to glorify God. In the U.S., especially growing up in the South, I always heard “black gold.” I lived on the Gulf, on the peninsula of Ft. Morgan, where oil rigs are not far from the beach and at night glitter brighter than the stars. During snapper season you fish on the rigs; gas is always cheap. Fracking meant the industry exploded where I lived, even during the recession. Gold is always what is most important to us; as a society, it’s what makes our worlds go round. The world basically fell apart during the oil spill (how ironic that a bounty of what is most precious can wreak catastrophic havoc). It was like taking the U.S. off the gold standard back in the ‘30s (here I only have a mental image of a man standing over shimmering gold bars, like in a political cartoon), except…except a lot of things. That’s probably not an accurate comparison to make, but to me, it’s the only one that fits.
In Europe, it’s not black gold but green gold—not the oil industry but the olive industry, specifically olive oil. Just like corn is the base ingredient of almost everything in America, here it’s olives or olive oil. If one day, a plague of locusts descended on the Mediterranean and ate all of Europe’s olives, it’d be a similar apocalyptic crisis. BP service stations closing en masse. Orange boom bobbing on the horizon at the mouth of the bay. Parking lots that smelled like gas, sandy lumps on the beach that seeped oil and tar when cracked like an egg, commercials on TV of Dawn dish soap cleaning the wings of baby pelicans in south Louisiana. The constellations of nighttime oil rigs suddenly dark.
When I draw in tinta china, the inky black slick it creates on the paper reminds me of oil—the way it beads up in the cartridge, the slippery brush sometimes dripping on the paper. I think about that summer a lot. My parents told everyone they knew, “They day they cap that well, we’re having a party.” My mother thought the entire ecosystem would collapse; her grandchildren would never be able to swim in the bay we grew up on. We took days off school soon after in April and May, spending days at the beach before the slick hit, chartering a shrimp boat another day to see all the animals that lived with us, with whom we shared a home. She was terrified we were the next Hudson Bay disaster, and that twenty years in the future we’d still be finding oil slicks beneath the icebergs. All those baby shrimp in the Bon Secour Bay estuary would be extinct.
That’s a memory I suppressed for a long time. The Gulf Coast was wrecked by ecological disaster my entire childhood, and I didn’t really view it that way until I went to college, because at home it’s always been that way. My grandmother once said that everyone has a defining hurricane—that’s why she was so aghast when my parents named me Camille, the horrifying storm that drained the bay. A lot of older people still hear my name, cock their head to see if they heard me right, and say, “Like the hurricane?” For my dad it’s Danny (he missed a month of high school, and the power was out for thirty days), and for my mom it’s Frederick—her grandparents’ roof blew off in Mobile, and when the eye passed over, they spent sixteen hours working to repair it until hunkering back down in the house to finish out the storm. Even Thomas Walden, a U.S.V.I. boy I met on Nantucket who suddenly found himself transplanted in the Northeast, still talks about Maria. His father lost power for four months during Thomas’s sophomore year of college. He’d only hear from him every few weeks via SAT phone; when his phone flashed during lecture, he’d sprint outside to take the call.
The sun shifting so the entire fountain is now cast in shadow, I’m now over on a bench, not looking at the posterior façade head-on but now oblong, like the Greek agoras and the layout of their monuments. The shadows are sharper here, longer. There’s a photoshopped quality to the spires because the light side and the dark side are so two-toned in the bright sun and sky; there’s no gradation. The posterior façade could be trompe l’oeil on the clean blue sky—there’s no convincing visual evidence that it’s not. All I see are flat eight tones and three tones intersecting at a corner. It’s more reminiscent of one of my 3-tone ink drawings than a three-dimensional cathedral.
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.
