I’ve just swooped into the fast lane, visiting Barcelona, Spain. The Spanish language trickles from my cerebral crevices; I understand more than I’d have believed. How I love this place! How I love the people and culture! The art is a continual birth and revelation. Gaudi! How could he have created such work in the late 1800’s? It still looks modern! He was a seeker of truth, a lover of nature, applying geometry to architecture with conoids, shapes, and laws of nature. Snails shells, honeycombs, trees! All over his cathedrals and works!
Goya: fearlessly reporting the atrocities of war in his art - all with beauty, horror, realism, magnitude. I see how Goya shaped Picasso (another Spaniard) in his search for meaning. How Picasso fervently paints the enormous Guernica in one month! Just a month after Franco allows Hitler to try out his new toys of destruction on an innocent Basque town! As Picasso said, “artists are the politicians of the future…”
This Sunday, my partner and I visited the Picasso museum in Barcelona where the viewer is informed of the arc of his life. He is born of a painter, he lives a long life ‘til the end painting, creating. In his teens, he starts precociously winning prizes and gallery showings. This is an understandably derivative time of an artist, copying masters in a learning process. It’s when inspiration hits and Picasso transforms his process to a personal quest is where it gets fascinating. The Blue Period: a declaration of intimate, sad feeling as he is influenced by French poets, writers (Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire.) Of course we see life fly by, children born and on the by-ways as painting remains his focus; the women subsumed by his career as they flounder in theirs; the marriages strained, then over and on to the next. Truly his career is a metaphor for Western History (or as James Brown sings, “This is a man’s world…”). He finds his voice continually anew, sometimes by following previous masters (Goya as a political voice, El Greco as teacher, Velazquez as artistic counterpoint informing his cubism.) He finds this childlike cubism. He paints, sculpts, lithographs, draws on napkins, in sea sand, cartoons himself as a dirty old man, makes posters, paints again. He never ceases.
I take heart and lesson in Picasso’s proliferation. He was constantly surrounded by paint cans, strewn paint-stained clothing. He did not falter in his process of the Great Search; the anguishing hunt for meaning in a deeply thinking and feeling human life, the life of an artist. A true artist is one who uses his or her art to consciously elevate, instruct (personally, universally.) I take heart and lesson in his example to not stop. Honestly, I think of stopping all too often, as my Great Search causes me too much pain. I do see a long life ahead of me and will try harder to not abandon my search, my daily fumblings to create a song; to sing. I will fly home Friday, con La Espana en mi corazon, remembering how my soul sparkles here. I will hold onto the lessons her artists give me.
