Dreamscapes

It has been a long time since I didn’t enter this Infinity here.. well, I was on some other, perhaps more exciting, or at least with much more people there. I am speaking of Easelspace, the artist community Adrian, jean and me are leading. A great place I must say, and not only because it is ours! It is a community created by artists for artists, a welcoming place of extreme artistic creativity. The site has many great functions that allow people to exhibit their art and actively take part in the community’s artistic process. And now we have extended the activity, writers and poets are welcome to write about the Easelspace paintings which inspire them.

But well, I haven’t been totally inactive artistically. As always, when I have a serious life of business woman, I need a balance which concretely  manifests itself in random weird paintings. No control about what I paint -and no need to!- I let the fingers do what they want.

All are filed now in my “Dreamscapes” series…

Here are some of the results

The Dream of the Fish That carried His House on His Back

I hope nobody here will try to analyze it. But of course you are all welcome to put words on it, poems, short stories, whatever , and to join me at Easelspace!

La Ménagerie

Sketching Trip to The Sierra Nevada – 03

27th of July 2010

Capileira

We drove from Trevelez to Capileira, on the other side of the valley, on a road hardly safer than the one on which we had arrived. But when the sun is shining and no black clouds are hanging over the gorges, it looks less dangerous.. But still, at many points,  great chunks of the mountains had fallen down onto our side of the road, while the other side of the road had collapsed into the gorges. That day I took it with a laugh but only as long as there was  enough road left to allow us to pass!  The laughing stopped when we suddenly saw a lot of cars and lorries stopped by the roadside, including the Guardia Civil, and all the people somehow looking down into the gorge… I guess a car had gone off the edge as it collapsed…  scary stuff, really!

The town Capileira. is certainly less impressive than Trevelez, much smaller and without the ambition to reach the sky! Quite cute though, full of cool shops along the main road, good sketching motifs everywhere. But here again I faced some unexpected problems. In fact it is the problem which many artists face when they start painting  Andalusian villages: white houses, red flowers in pots hanging from balconies, green leaves, blue sky… very attractive and refreshing for the eye, but , in my humble opinion, a trap for the artist: kitsch is never far away! Sincerely, I think these villages are not really adequate for good oil or acrylics paintings, except if one can find some kind of abstraction where one is able to artistically reconcile all the basic elements involved. Total realism doesn’t do it for me, not even by the hand of skilled painters.

Here in Capileira I tried myself to ‘fight the kitsch’ using pastel chalks, but pastel is a dangerous tool in itself, easy to fall into triviality., and again, as in Trevelez, I failed!!! In my defence I must add that in my travel set the chalk pieces are all mixed and it is almost impossible to recognise which colour they are.

Eventually I came back to my usual sketching ink and watercolour technique, which at least normally renders the lightness and freshness of the subject quite well.

But still: although it was better than in Trevelez, I didn’t feel comfortable sketching. I felt tense, nervous… perhaps there were again too many people around, and a “snobbish” atmosphere pervading the town. Somehow the feeling that the people here, above all the foreigners, thought they were something better for being here, all wandering around in their expensive climbing outfits with a walking stick in hand! Do they feel so superior because they climb some mountain in the Sierra Nevada? Or is it me, who feels so inferior, just sitting down on the road , in my dusty trousers, my sketch book and my little magic wand in my hand? The times are long gone when being an artist brought you some consideration…

And if somebody does take some notice of you and stops by, it is just to tell you that he paints too, or somebody in the family does. Or a friend. The distance between an artist and a normal person is minimal nowadays.

Like the woman who saw me drawing and stopped by for a while. No interest whatsoever in what I was doing. She simply started telling me that there was a wonderful exhibition in one of the local restaurants..A Japanese painter had arrived once in Capileira  and started painting the villages around, just for bread and bed.

Later on I went and had a look. I was extremely curious to see how a Japanese artist dealt with the Andalusian kitsch… well, he didn’t really, the kitsch is there, omnipresent, but at least sometimes he had managed to rescue it, adding some Japanese traditional elements to the paintings like a naked black branch with a bird on it….

But you know, some people love that Andalusian kitsch, Like that woman who sent me to the exhibition.  Commenting on my paintings, from which she saw some on the gallery leaflet I gave her, she just said,

“They are very romantic…”

No idea if this was meant as a compliment. But judging from the expression on her face, I guess not. No wonder actually: Spaniards seem to live on the other side of romanticism, as eager as possible to avoid it!

By Miki

Sketching Trip in The Sierra Nevada – 02 –

25th of July 2010

Trevelez

“In Trevelez you will touch the sky”

….is written at the entrance of the town.What they forgot to say is that you have to be quite fit if you want to touch the sky here! The town is divided into 3 parts: the low, the middle and the high. Logically, the sky is the closest to the high part, but even there stretching your fingers won’t be enough to touch it, you still have to climb higher. Quite close though!

This of course makes the village very interesting to sketch. Interesting but difficult, a real challenge. Steep narrow streets running up and down, houses all over the place invading all space dimensions, outlines crossing each other wherever you look… well, I am quite used to crazy buildings and weird villages, but I must admit having had a tough time sketching in the town. I didn’t get anything right, all perspective and dimensions were wrong, Not that I am a fan of sticking to dimensions and perspective, quite the contrary in fact. But everything I tried went wrong! Not wrong in that charming style which looks like as if you did it on purpose. Simply wrong,  and totally unprofessional.

My God, I felt so ashamed!

Many people were around, it was a Sunday,  tourists from all continents trying to touch the sky, and of course I was quite an attraction sitting on the road and sketching! Thankfully most of them didn’t bother to look at my pad, probably too exhausted from climbing. Anyway, as an old hand at the art of sketching in public, I had taken the precaution of sitting against the wall, with no possibility for anybody to come from behind and look over my shoulder. People think  they are very clever, they think I don’t get at all what is going on around me when I sit there,  so concentrated and focussed on my motif. They always try to fool me. Yes, I am very concentrated, but I also always  feel like a tracked wild animal, all senses open, aware of every tiny movement and smell around me. I notice everything… Also, you can’t imagine how often these “papparazzi” are taking photographs of me while I am sketching, believing I don’t notice it. They think they are incredibly clever, strategically placing one of their number not far from me, feigning a holiday photo. I know the trick, I use it often enough myself when I want to photograph somebody without getting their permission first.

Whatever… I bravely kept on sketching, fighting against all these adversarial elements, but eventually I gave up, in the meantime being in a much too horrible mood to go on. The feeling of failure was extremely deep. It is rare by me, not that I rarely fail, but I had to learn wisdom through all these years of sketching outside and painting. I don’t expect much, just trying to enjoy the process, not thinking of the result. I have become quite good at it. But here in Trevelez, it really took me by surprise, never felt so crap like that before in my entire life as an artist.

Is that what they mean by “touching the sky”?

Because I sincerely think I touched HELL!

But still, I would recommend this place to everybody, Painters or no. Trevelez is a very special town, unusual, with splendid views and an original layout. And for those who love the Spanish ham, the famous “jamon serrano” – well, it will be heaven for them here. I guess this is what they mean by “touching the sky”: Thousands of hams are hanging all over the town, and the smell too!

What is weird though is that you don’t get to see one pig. Many horses yes, lovely peaceful horses grazing in the fields at the foot of the mountains. But not one pig…. They are probably all dead and hanging in the shops…

PS: as I went back to the motorhome that day, unable to settle for defeat, I started at once working on the sketches trying to save them. I used pastels, it made it easier to cover all the problem lines and angles… 

In the end, surprisingly, I am quite happy with the result!

These paintings are available directly online as Giclee prints in many different dimensions, on paper or canvas, and also as greeting cards. Just click on the widgets below to access my FAA store

 

And more generally you can see all the stuff I paint by going to my gallery “Miki’s Enchanted World”