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.

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.