Work: Art and Otherwise

(Sigh, this should have been two entries. I'm verbose - where on earth did i get *that* from??)

So, i have a strong desire to not spend *all* of my money in Spain. I'd like to have enough to go to India and Bali and then a little to get set up in Charlottesville for a few months. Jette is the funky way cool director of the art school i'm attending, and after meeting her children i offered her my babysitting services. She immediately said she could send my information to a list of "mummies" that she's connected to in the area, and shortly after she did that, i was flooded with job offers. Hooray! I've taken two; i need time to work in the studio and do yoga and enjoy the city, and with two i'm making 60+ euro a week, which makes my life much more comfortable.

One family lives on the edge of the city. They have two children, and i work with their daughter, Alexandra, primarily. She's five, and precocious and adorable. Her favorite movie is the Little Mermaid. We get along famously. Their mother is very insistent that i only and always speak English. The first day i was working with Alex, she was tenaciously trying to teach me Spanish, asking me to say names of colors and animals - the same approach i was using in English! It's hard, using only English when she doesn't always understand (sometimes i cheat and whisper to her in Spanish if i really need to). Her little brother, Arthur, is terribly rambunctious and i can't possibly teach Alex any English if i'm having to wrangle him too, so he stays with his mom while i'm there, mercifully. The first day i was there, she did have me with both of them, and afterwards i thought, "What have i gotten myself into?!?"

The second family i only started with yesterday. They live in Segur de Calafell, which is a 45-minute train ride out of the city. It's kind of a long way, but i like the train, and the air is cleaner there. They also have a daughter and a son, 4 years and 20 months respectively. It was a huge hassle to get there yesterday, with confusion on my part due to omission of detail on the mother's part. Whoops. But i did arrive, and went from the train station to pick up the daughter at a friend's house, where we lingered and lingered while the girls played. The friend's house was up on a hill with an incredible view of sea in the distance - the town is smallish, and tucked in around mountains on the shore, like Barcelona, but without the large valley that Barcelona occupies. At their house, the mother and i sat at the kitchen table and got to know each other. She spoke to me in rapid fire Spanish, and after a while i realized i'd spent the entire day speaking Spanish and that i was understanding and responding well. In other words, having real, adult conversations in Spanish about things other than, how much does this cost? and where is the train station? She's more interested in straight forward childcare than formal teaching English. She said she wants someone with fresh energy and a different cultural background to spend time with her kids, and "if you want to speak some English, great." The town where they live, curiously, is five minutes from Sitges, which is where the Spanish foreign exchange student we had when i was five (i think?) is from.

Here's what i've been working on in the studio. More cutouts, more collage, but evolving. Metafora students are invited every year to participate in an AIDS exhibition in the city. Initially i was not planning on submitting a piece, but i've since had an idea (inspired by my chicken-wire collage!) and so i'm currently researching and sketching. I've got a pretty good visual brainstorm going. I think.

Here's the final (ha) version of the dancing ladies:



This piece directly inspired by my yoga teacher, likely not the final version. I was so excited about the yellow paper and now i'm that i'm using i'm less than enthused about the results.



Same deal with this one, the yellow paper cut-outs, i believe, have got to go. I've pulled them off since this picture:



Oh yeah, ick. Those should not come back. Anyway, moving on...



No idea what will go between the trees.

I'm quite excited about this painting below. I used a hand-printing technique that didn't go quite as i'd planned, but i liked the way it turned out anyway. I used the sheela-na-gig pattern from the other piece to create negative space, as well as leaves and organic material collected from a nearby park. After the printing part, i used the leaves as a stamp. To take care of my aversion to white paper these days, i brushed over the whole thing with a tint when i was finished.



This one i made with a similar hand-printing technique, but i used a jar, and then more leaf-stamps afterwards. I am soooo rebelling against what i learned in painting class at Centre. Or maybe i'm building on it. Yeah, that's it, evolving... Whatever, i like it quite a lot, maybe even enough to let the paper around it stay white.



I'm floating the idea of the sheela cut out on this one, too. I just love her! Though maybe the dancing lady would be better on that one...



And here's my latest effort. The leaves i used to "stamp" onto the pages with looked so pretty i couldn't just toss them, so they became this:



I'm still figuring out how to get the wire to stay. Sew it to the paper, probably.

Don't worry, i can still draw people.

Gaudi and More Strange Customs

So, a couple of weeks ago i finally went to see the Sagrada Familia and Park Guell, two of the major Gaudi works in Barcelona. They were cool, but i have to say i don't really understand what all the fuss is about. I like the Palau de la Musica much better, which is a modernist work, but isn't even by Gaudi. I didn't go in the Sagrada Familia, because it costs 10€! The Sagrada Familia is famously perpetually under construction, despite Gaudi's death in the 20s. The front is the newer part, and is much different than the back. It's been criticized as not being in keeping with Gaudi's vision. I walked through Park Guell, took advantage of the open space to play with my poi, talked to some jewelry-makers (i got a stunning handmade amethyst bracelet for 10€, much more worth it than going into the Sagrada Familia). I didn't stay there long, though, the tourists were kind of overwhelming. It's on top of a hill (a REALLY BIG hill), so the view was spectacular.



Then i spent the rest of the day at the beach.

Last weekend was Barcelona's celebration of La Merce, which is different than what i went to in Tarragona, which was not actually La Merce, just Catalunya's national day. La Merce is the festival in honor of the Virgin of Mercy, who supposedly saved the city from a plague of locusts once upon a time. The legend is more complicated than that, but i can't remember it all. Anyway, the whole city celebrates with free concerts and parades and such all weekend. Also, everyone gets drunk. Walking around that night, it was like being in college on a Friday night, except instead of just the campus, it was the whole city. It was pretty amazing. I went to see two amazing DJs spin at an open-air venue near the sea, as well as seeing the Carrefoc parade, which is basically a bunch of people in devil costumes running around with fireworks. Seriously. What that has to do with the Virgin of Mercy, i can't quite comprehend.



I LOVE living in Barcelona. I love riding the metro, i love the buildings, i love the sea, the market, the people in the street, speaking Spanish and getting better at it. I love my classes and my studio and the tutors. My classmates are great. I discovered an incredible area of the city yesterday, and i know there are more that i'll find. I think that if my framily was here with me, i'd just be happy as a clam to stay for a while. Though, if Sarah Palin ends up president of the United States... well, this isn't a political blog.

So that's basically what i've been up to, other than joining a gym, where i'm swimming and taking capoeira classes. Of course, i've also been busy in the studio, progressing with the paper dolls and moving in a new direction with them as of today! But that's for the next post. Happy Friday!

Finding a Routine

School has started in earnest now, we're through the introductory phase and workshops began this week. I'm sitting in on the figure drawing workshop, so i can take it or leave it as i please, since i already have a lot of experience with it. Yesterday i took body casting, which was absolutely incredible! Today i took welding, which i stayed for about a third of and then got too freaked out to stay. Did you know that the mask you have to wear when you weld doesn't allow you to see anything but the light from the welding machine? I had no idea. Noooo thank you. Cutting the steel was bad enough, sparks flying everywhere and crazy noise... I think that part of the call of art for me is the kinesthetic sense i get of putting pencil to paper, paintbrush to pain, and, though i've mostly avoided 3-D art, even fingers to clay (or plaster, these days).

So i fled the welding shop to the safety of my own studio, and continued working on the stuff i already had started. I've loved working with collage so far, and i did more of it today. As i've mentioned, i'm working with the theme of the body. I thought i'd posted some pieces already, but i realize i haven't! Ah yes, i said the next entry was going to be about the art exhibits i've seen. Oops, oh well. So -

This is the first shape i worked with, a dancing lady. I love this figure, it's joyful, sensual, and unabashed. Originally this lady was part of a whole row on white paper, but the others got altered:



For some reason i've gotten quite averse to working on stark white paper, and i've been using a lot of brown paper bags, of all things. Here's the rest of the dancing ladies, which where originally on white:



I got really annoyed with the white and filled the space quickly and without thinking too hard about it, and really screwed it up, so i cut out the parts i liked and put it on the brown paper. Since that photo, other elements have been added and it looks more finished, but i don't seem to have a photo of it.

This piece is yoga-inspired. It began as this and evolved to this:



The text around the figures in the original is a sutra from a yogic text, the Vijnana Bhairava, that i study as part of my teacher training. It says:

"The flowers, the candles, the honey
that are offered in worship are
made out of the same divine stuff as you.
Who then is worshipped?"

I haven't added it back into the second version, but i will.

This little piece was inspired by the pre-Christian figure of Sheela-Na-Gig, predominately found in Ireland:



It was quite an evolution, getting the composition right. It started here, then i tried this. Neither of those worked for me, so i moved on, and ended up with the one you see above. Actually, looking at the four versions, i'm not sure which i like better. The figures aren't glued down yet, so i can still change my mind. Suggestions?

This piece is less related directly to the body theme, but i love it:



After the body casting workshop, i did a cast of my own torso, which was an amazing experience. I love the way it turned out, but, um, it's kind of like me naked from the waist to collarbone, so i'm just going to link it instead of posting the image. This is what the texture of the surface is like:



I have very exciting plans for that one, though.

So i've been buzzing along and working a lot, i'm very excited about my cut-outs and collages, though they're very, very different from anything i've ever worked on before. Because of the training i've had, i have this concept that art should be hard and should take a long time to realize. Most of these pieces have taken a couple of sessions of two hours or so, but i'm really happy with them and would put them under glass as they are, and feel good about showing them. That's a very radical feeling for me!

Also, feedback is very welcome.

Castells, Torres, y Pilares

(Castles, Towers, and Pillars)

Mid-September in Barcelona sees the Festiu de la Mercè, Festival of Saint Mary of Mercy, Catalonia's "national day" - like Independence Day, except Catalonia isn't independent. So we have a four-day weekend from school. I decided to go to Tarragona, which is a short train ride south of Barcelona. It's a Roman city, with relatively intact ruins and beautiful, less crowded beaches. I spent most of the day checking out the ruins and swimming. The ruins were nice, but not much once you've seen the Pont du Gard and Le Temple de Diane and the arena (and so on...) in Nimes, France. The beach was indeed lovely, i hiked out to a sparsely populated small beach hidden between two cliffs. I swam for probably three hours, enjoying the bigger waves, the scenery, and losing an earring. A handmade garnet piece i got on the Charles Bridge in Prague, i'm quite sad about it, actually.

After a very late lunch and some sketching, i got to see the "human castles." It's some kind of tradition of building very high towers out of people. It's a little hard to explain, so i took a bunch of pictures!

There are different teams that participate, though it's not a competition and they all seem to help each other. Each one has their own little outfit. The first thing they do is wrap their lower backs with stretchy black cloth. They wrap it very tightly. This has a two-fold purpose - the first is to protect the back, and the second... well, you'll see shortly.



This guy used a neck brace as well:



Then they made a big mass of people. I'm sure there was a very deliberate structure to it, but it wasn't clear to the untrained eye:



It was obvious that they were making kind of a human flying buttress.



Then they started building...









Structural integrity requires a special kind of intimacy in this situation:



Now, even i, with my unpracticed human-tower building skills, could figure out that the bigger, heavier people went on the bottom, and the smaller, lighter ones went on top. What i didn't expect was out little and light the ones on the very top would be:



That little girl is not older than 6!

Here's the second one being built. If you look closely, you can see the second reason for the black bands - footholds!





A third one, with little teeny girls ready to scale to the top:



My favorite part was the beginning of the end. The little ones would climb to the top for just a split second, wave, and then they would shimmy down all the way to the bottom, like they were sliding down a coconut tree. I thought it was incredibly cute, but i can't imagine ever letting my own child do something like that. They must have been up three stories. And one of the towers got quite wobbly at one point!




Today i went to see the Olafur Eliasson exhibit, which i'll write about in my next entry. Tomorrow, the flea market! And possibly La Sagrada Familia, a massive landmark i have yet to see.

"That Guy" and More Pictures

You know how there's always one? You know, that guy (or girl). As soon as he or she opens his or her mouth to talk, the whole rest of the class braces for the awfulness that will soon spew forth.

Today we were talking about our respective cultures and what they mean as far as our identity. The first theme we've been given to work with is the Tower of Babel. One of the Americans in the class seemed to think he was running the discussion (he knows everything about everything). At one point he interrupted an Icelandic woman "just so i can clear this one thing up about America." And started trying to "debunk" some stereotype about American politicians being the most corrupt - i wasn't aware of that one - making a total fool of himself and embarrassing the rest of the Americans in the room. At the same time, he managed to forcefully uphold that other stereotype about Americans (loud, ignorant, obnoxious). Finally, the tutor who was actually running the discussion said, "Stop talking." Sheesh.

Now, pictures of the apartment, inside.

My room!





This is Raul and Luis, in the ginormous-especially-for-a-European-apartment kitchen:



Hallway. For reference on the height of the ceilings, that coat rack you see on the wall is about at head level for me.



The living room:



The living room again, with the doors opening onto the balcony:


And here's the view from the balcony. It's the metro stop!


Today we were assigned our first projects and given just over an hour to do them - a 15 cm x 15 cm self portrait of our "identity," within the cultural context that we'd spent the morning talking about. Here's what i made:



It's interesting, it seems like none of us in the workshop had particularly strong feelings about our home countries. The older students, the ones from Iceland, were an exception, but also their country is tiny and isolated. There was some discussion of globalization and the internet having a big impact on our generation and how we feel our cultural identities.

Someday when i have nothing else to post about, i'll write about the washing machine.

A Spanish Sunday

Left to my own devices, with no work schedule or meetings on the weekends, it amazes me how fast i'll switch to a nocturnal rhythm. Friday night i was up until 4 AM, Saturday until 5 AM. This isn't helped by the fact that the people i really miss and want to talk online with are around, because it's a reasonable hour for them. Anyway, despite my late night last night, i was able to get up by 1 PM and out of the house to do something by 3ish.

The first Sunday of every month, the Picasso museum is free, so i went there. I loved it last time i was in Barcelona, but this round, i was rather disappointed. As a general rule, i think Picasso is overrated, but i love the Blue Period stuff, and he was quite a skilled portraitist, before he got into Cubism. And of course, it's flooring that he produced so much exhibition worthy work before he was 15. I love Cézanne's version of Cubism, but Picasso's is so flat, it's like looking at a math problem. Which, of course, works for some people. Anyway, i think they rotate their permanent collection, because i didn't see any of the portraits that bowled me over before, and their representation of the Blue Period was quite small. That's not how i remembered it, i wonder if they have stuff out on loan as well. Anyway, i'm glad i went, and i'm glad i went on a free admission day!

The museum is in one of the oldest parts of the city, in the area of the Barri Gótic and El Born. It's extremely intriguing there. The streets are impossibly narrow and the buildings are tall, so it gives a real sense of being in a maze. I even passed some frustrated American exclaiming, "How do we get out of this rat trap?!" I spent a couple of hours wandering pleasantly around, enjoying first an espresso, then a peach twice the size of my fist, and then vegan gelato. I sat on a corner on Via Laietana, between El Born and La Rambla, enjoying my ice "cream" and watching people and pigeons. Then i hopped on the metro and went to the beach :)

It just hit me today that i can go to the ocean whenever i want to, and how good for me that is. I spent most of Saturday sleeping or online, and when i did go out late in the afternoon, i felt tired and lost. I was missing Ethan and Angie in particular and woke up in a funk today also. The caffeine, the sugar, and the wandering helped a lot, but as soon as i put my toes in the ocean and felt the pull and release of the tides, i really felt myself relax. It's still warm enough to swim, and will be for a while, so i intend on making the most of it while i can. I went to a different beach today, not far from the one i visited before, just on the other side of the port, Port Vell. It wasn't far, but it was a lot different! The sand was coarser and had more rocks, and the water was cloudier. After i swam, i sat there, listening to the seas around me - one (obviously) of water, the other of myriad languages and voices. Sometimes it amazes me that i made it here. It seems almost like a dream that i sat for hours and hours in JFK and flew to Iceland and was in Paris - yet here i am. I'm quite proud of myself!

I'm not doing a very good job of keeping a consistent practice. My yoga practice flares up every now and then, i'm eating kind of erratically, sleeping odd hours. I know good and well that it's important for me to have a consistent schedule, and that it's probably the most important thing for me to take time every day to get into my body, whatever form that may take - yoga, dance, poi, and to meditate regularly and eat mindfully, and i'm just not doing it, and it's showing in my volatile moods. I know my art will be better, too, if i can keep a consistent practice. Hopefully it will be easier with only a 15 minute commute to school.

Which i'll be making again tomorrow! They're introducing the first theme - The Tower of Babel - though i've already decided what theme i'm working with, which is fine they said for "more mature" artists. Tuesday i have my welcome interview, when i'll get assigned my personal tutor.

Someday i'll write about the art exhibits i saw at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Also, interior apartment pictures coming soon, as soon as i clean my room. Er...

New Digs and New Ideas

After Yara and Martin told me they wanted me to leave, the very next day right after class i started scouring the internet and making phone calls - mostly in Spanish! I called and called and lots of people were like, yeah, you can come see tomorrow; or we have people looking, we'll call you if that doesn't work out... etc. And then i called Raul. "Can i come see the apartment now?" Yes!

So i went, only one metro stop from school, met Raul and saw the apartment. It was beautiful! High ceilings, a balcony in the front and a porch in the back, and bedroom 3 times the size of the one i was currently occupying (no window, though), a large kitchen... "I'd love to move in," I said almost right away. It was well within my budget, and i wanted to move as fast as possible. He said he had three more people to show the apartment to but that he would call me at 7:30 and tell me. So i waited nervously, and finally i got the word - you can move in tonight! I hopped on the train, went back to Yara's, packed my stuff in half an hour and got the heck out of there.

Now i live near Plaza Espana, and it's a 15 minute walk from here to school. There's a tiny tiny grocery store on the corner, and the metro is fifty steps from my front door. I live with Raul and Luis, a cute Spanish couple, and Clemens, an Austrian student. It's not what i expected, moving to Barcelona, but i think it's actually an infinitely better situation. As Angie said, "Yara is just doing the work of the goddess."

Here's my building:



Right now i only have pictures of the lobby and stairwell:





Oh, and this is my front door.



School is still going well, i'm conceptualizing a massive project based around the idea of disconnection from the body. I'm planning on incorporating lots of different elements, sculpture and photography as well as painting and drawing. It's like nothing i've ever done before, and i'm really really excited about it. I have the time and the space and the support to do something like this for the first time. It's ambitious, and it may not fly, or may turn out like something entirely different than what i have in my head - it's morphed a few times already.

Here are some pictures of school!



There's a beautiful courtyard in the middle of the building:





My tiny (but mine!) studio:



This is the mural i'm working on, Saraswati. It looks a lot better now!



A hallway with bees:





European toilets are always an adventure. What do i do to make it flush? This one at school has a pull chain, and the whole things is mounted on the wall near the ceiling:



This is the student kitchen, adjacent to the courtyard and the darkroom. The sign on the open door says, Please Keep This Door Closed at All Times.



And me in the window :)