Portraits of Seville

*A curatorial note on the study of people.

Even though I’ve always drawn, drawing has not always been my thing. In elementary school I’d write for fun, and writing was my thing. Drawing was just the musical accompaniment to the main show. But now drawing is my thing, and has become as integral to the writing as the protagonist. 

I joined a figure drawing group when I arrived in Seville, naively thinking that the human study was going to be something like the caricature-like gestures people of people you might find in an urban sketch. Wrong. This was a Renaissance study of the human form in the nude. My acute foreignness has never been so apparent than on my first night in that rooftop studio in Barrio Santa Cruz surrounded by seasoned old artists sketching a nude model. 

Capturing the human form has never, before now, been my ultimate goal nor my favorite thing to do; I always feel like I can write the human condition better than I can draw it, and it is just flat-out difficult to draw a human. Well, that was all the more reason to give it my most valiant attempt. For ten minutes at a time in the Ático studio I can capture the essence of the nudes—the Venus, the heroin addict, the Rembrandt model, the pornography actress—and in the statue hall at the University I can depict them accurately in all their shapes and shadows.

But the elusive, urban human form still evades me. They turn out like cartoons with mismatched body parts of clashing proportions, one’s forehead mashed into an inch between eyebrow and hairline with another’s head shrinking like a popped balloon into the recesses of her coat. Even though I try to draw the person in the exact moment I see them, it is not an accurate depiction because the drawing ends after the motion, and by the time I look up to get a second glance, the form has always changed (not to mention the awkward creepiness when, on the third or fourth glance, the subject comes to the horrifying realization that they’re being watched). My best urban sketches of humans are a series of gestural loops and lines, the way I depicted a brass band on the street a couple of days ago.

A few weeks ago, I developed a method for remembering the person and the one single moment by identifying three notable things about their appearance so I could parcel it away in my memory. For the girl standing in front of me waiting at the crosswalk: pearl headband, painted jean jacket, tulle skirt. For a child I saw on her way to school this morning: fur-lined hood over her head, jewel-stud earrings, tiny backpack. For the schoolgirl walking down the Calle Asunción yesterday: olive green knee socks, thick black eyebrows, and red school vest. She also had a shiny chocolate lab with green eyes, but that counts more for the dog than for her. 

That little developmental trick hasn’t helped me much with drawing my people, but has definitely refined my observation. Take the man sitting across from me at the table: wet, chin-length hair, checkered scarf, mustached. The boy sitting next to him: green Barbour jacket, long nose, gingham shirt. The woman who always makes my coffee: black hair, middle part, pinned away from her face, big dark eyes, tight lips. It’s a way to see, a way to remember who and what you’ve seen, and it’s also a different way of urban sketching people. Lists of people line up like dominoes in my journal. Baby carriage, sweater vest, Oxfords. Fur coat, bright silk neck scarf, cane. Rain coat, joggers, spectacles. Pink coat, short gray hair with a side swoop, Longchamp backpack.

Baile de Chiquititas. Pen and India ink on notebook paper. 17 October 2019.

Slowly, I’m learning to fall in love with the people of Seville. I walk down the Calle Asunción and find two little girls in matching sets of pink and purple roller skates, knee pads, elbow pads, and helmets collapsing all over the bike lane like limp noodles, giggling as their anxious, doting dad picks them up, only to watch them fall over again.

Picture a teeny-tiny little girl in a cap sleeve dress, sitting on a ledge carved out of the bank, kicking her heels against the wall. She reminds me of the “Almendrita” (little almond) Spanish bedtime tale, because she’s so endearingly small. Think of a place where no one has earbuds. No one is scared to hear their own thoughts; to hear their heart beat. 

Portrait of a Gentle Soul. Pen and india ink on notebook paper. 11 October 2019. 

Portrait of a man in his late thirties, rendered here in profile with strong hands and a beard, a striped shirt painted in thick white gouache cuffed at his elbows. He notices a cart-horse alone in the gentle day-glow of Impressionistic light, and it is uncomfortable, flies swarming its nose and foaming at the mouth. The man earns the animal’s trust with strokes on its soft nose, lifting its lips and readjusting the bit to a more comfortable position. The gentle soul nuzzles the man at his chest, rousing a smile before he exits the frame.

Picasso, Pablo. Woman in Thought. Spray paint on mirror. 2019.

The Woman in Thought drips down the face of a mirrored metro sign outside the Puerta de Jerez, and at night her green graffiti visage glows fluorescent and eery, like the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg or even God himself. She has a damaged upper lip, scarred into a position of perpetual inquisition, and her brow is eternally furrowed around intelligent jewel-like eyes. A drip, a flaw of the medium, suggests an electric tear punctuating her perplexing countenance, but the Woman in Thought withholds judgement and, though amongst the crowd, she watches over it, omniscient and all-knowing. The choice of canvas reflects the different perspectives she sees and protects, creating a third dimension out of two-dimensional space. She is almost raised from the surface, her continuity creating life out of line.

The Evening Cigarette. Gouache, acrylic, and watercolor on wood. 2019.

This is a portrait of my host father, Guillermo Cole, when he leans against the terrace balcony, framed by the sunset peaking through our surrounding buildings. This is a portrait of Guillermo Cole across the table at lunch; every day a painting in gouache acrylic layered one on top of the other. This is a portrait of Guillermo Cole peaking around the bookshelf corner with an orange and a knife, about to test me in my orange-peeling abilities. The acrylic and gouache is layered thick onto the canvas, impasto blocks of color like a George W. Bush portrait painting. You can see each brushstroke in his face: swathes of cadmium red from his nose, blocks of opera pink constructing his jawline. Heavy strokes of blue lie beneath the green and white lines that make up his upper lip. 

I once had a professor warn me about the danger of too much line. It’s all about atmospheric perspective: they look like a cluster of perfectly orderly details, but when you take a few steps away, they fail to hold up, and the picture falls apart. On the contrary, this portrait takes a cue from the Impressionists. I put my nose to the wall, staring into three thick strokes of ivory white, forest green, and violet, and see nothing. I close my eyes and take three steps back. Open again. It’s my father in his truest form, loose and wonky, vivid and Expressionistic. Rather than the way I’ve been taught to see, I see him the way he is. 

Earlier on in the semester, we used to rub each other the wrong way a lot. He’d make a blustery claim about racism in the U.S., then defame Arab immigrants in Andalusia, and I, a newly-minted college student from the U.S. couldn’t stand it. I’d complain in private, while the man with the cigarette orbited from the kitchen to the table to the terrace, languid revolutions in my life that slowly drove me crazy. Racism is wrong. Homophobia is wrong. The ideas perpetuated by nationalists and the global right is dangerous, threatening propaganda. 

But the longer I’m away from the U.S. the more I realize that everyone is truly different. That sounds like a stupid statement, coming from someone who sang “Jesus Loves All the Little Children of the World” on the church lawn with the rest of the Sunday school classes every year when I was young. Not only are we all different, but we are all flawed—and it’s wrong to think that I can write someone off in one sweeping motion for their opinions that conflict with mine. I, of all people, should know that humans are more complex than that. Every morning Guillermo stands at the terrace door and sniffs the air. “Ah, the nose of the Navajo Indian says it’s going to rain today.” He laughs, I smile. Together we orbit each other in a rosy glow of contentment and mutual admiration. I like him very much.

Now it is siesta, and the electric glow of a humming TV no one’s listening too flicks about in the reflection of his glasses. His wispy bird feather hair is swept across his sleeping face in a mix of Russian blue and raw sienna, darkened by a dab of neutral tint and a dry-brush fracture of zinc white splintering from his temples. He’s in a Prussian azure sweater with ovals and triangles of violet marking wrinkles; before him, a vaguely-rendered copper green gesture of a cigarette box, paired with an English red packet of rolling papers. From the confident brush strokes that make up his figure we move our gaze to the terrace at night, after a cup of green tea and saccharine. A mosaic of Paul Klee watercolor blues are a patchwork of the sky; the glow of the balconies across the way illuminate his silhouette like stars. When he turns back to face me, the cigarette lights a sweep of cadmium yellow deep highlight on his nose; his eyes crinkle into a smile.

I remember a very feminist high school history teacher explaining that if we—she was addressing everyone, but she really meant women—were interrupted, we should simply continue speaking. That’s a tactic that works well at my family dinner table when everyone is always interrupting one another regardless of gender. When Guillermo would cut me off in the beginning, finally killing off a mortally butchered Spanish sentence, I’d fume about Spanish machismo and internalized misogyny. Even now, I’ll try to jump in during one of his pauses, but oftentimes it’s not a lull in conversation but an occasion for him to gather his thoughts. In a moment of busy brow-furrowing and a second of blue thought, he’ll construct the next segment of his soliloquy before continuing on. It’s not a blustery steamroller of a ramble, but rather like a weaver who stops at the end of a line before tacitly turning the threads onto the next. 

From the kitchen, to the chair, to the balcony. Kitchen, chair, balcony. One light source: the window. Now we’re on the street, bundled from our toes to our noses. I’ve met my parents at la tienda, their store, and now we’re on a paseo through Seville. Down the Calle Asunción, across Puente de San Telmo, the light radiating from the Guadalquivir with a comforting golden hum—it’s acrylic and gouache slathered onto wood. Standing in the gallery, I reach forward and touch it when the attendant’s not looking, and it’s abrasive, rough, pulsing with life. The smoke of the evening cigarette trails atop the green river water like the muddy brushstrokes of Sorolla, the light fractured by spires like Cezanne. Torre de Sevilla, Torre de Oro, Torre de la Giralda, and the towers of the Plaza de España. I’m arm in arm with my host mother, and the man with the cigarette walks in solitude a few steps ahead. 

The silent acknowledgement of each other when we sit across the table. Side by side ironing our shirts in the perpendicular rays of the kitchen sunlight. Clustered in the corner after family dinner with the brothers-in-law, me drinking rum and him standing  at the window to blow the cigarette smoke out of the apartment. The smoke pixelates into a fine mosaic of French ultramarine and Antwerp blue before melting into pieces of a fractured frame à la Nall. It’s splattered with permanent  magenta, rose madder genuine, and cadmium scarlet.

I think of my day in the Museo de Bellas Artes, surrounded by a room of Spanish Impressionists. If you stand on the bench in the center of the wide, white room, the looming figures on the canvases leap to life. But when you stand eye to eye with them, claiming their personal space as your own, they disappear into a sea of rough brushstrokes, the composition of which make them who they are appears when you stand back. That’s all people; that is my host father, Guillermo Cole.

Light Study

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.