Arty Travels in Spain

Arty Travels in Spain

by Friend Jackie Halliday


The face of Barcelona. Don't you like her eyelashes? This imaginative sculpture by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein stands on the waterfront at Barcelona putting a smile on the face of all who walk by. She has multiple profiles so looks different depending on how you view her.

Anyway here we are in Spain in early Autumn. Having spent four days in Barcelona a few years ago we decided to begin our visit here. Included in our six week stay is a two week art course in a little Pueblo Blanco in Andalucia called Alcala de los Gazules. Before then we go to Bilboa to see the Guggenheim, Madrid and Seville. After the course we will complete the 'circle' coming back to Barcelona via Cordoba, Granada and Valencia. We'll also have a few days at Figueres and Cadaques to see the Dali museum. I have to say that my husband, Ian is the artist- I am just the hanger on.

In the old quarter of Barcelona, is the Picasso Museum. Well worth a second visit, to remind ourselves how skilful a portrait painter he was when only a teenager, and to follow the development of his style and technique. One of the most interesting exhibits is a multimedia show superimposing his cubist treatment on the painting of the Infanta Margarita by Velazquez. There are so many versions of the Infanta in her yellow dress that you can see how he was experimenting with different styles.  The temporary exhibition showed the influences on him when he was in Paris from 1900 to 1907. The highlight of which was a sparkling self portrait by van Gogh, with light reflecting off the layers of paint.

Writing this has been made easier by the purchase, in Singapore, of a little red and white netbook (an early birthday present!). It is very cute. For some reason I thought it would have much reduced functionality but it is really a small laptop without a DVD drive. 250 gb of hard drive isn't bad either! So now I can sit in a real cafe with wifi (they call it weefee here), have coffee and write, while Ian does sudoku, kakuro, sketches or plays Angry Birds on my phone (he's not as good as 3 yr old Blake). I'm just using WordPad, a basic word processor, which is fine.

Having arrived in Bilbao on a Monday, the Guggenheim was closed so we wandered the old city. It was very vibrant and alive, especially for a Monday morning, and obviously a local shopping area, not just full of tourist shops, which is often the case in old quarters. Signs are in Spanish and Basque as this is Basque country. It was interesting reading about the history of the Basque people, how they were forbidden to use their languge as late as the Franco era.

Not wanting to wait until the next day we wandered along the river front to have a peek at the Guggenheim from the opposite bank. What an amazing building, although we were surprised to find one end of it tucked under a bridge. This was one of architect Frank Gehry's challenges, to make it look as if it had aways been there. So he constructed two stone towers as an end piece and to mirror the supports of the bridge. A number of guide books say that the architecture is more impressive than the works inside. We were impressed with both. The titanium skin took a year to develop, to get the thickness and finish just right as the panels are meant to show the sinuousness and shimmering nature of fish scales. Apparently Frank Gehry played with live carp in the bath when he was a child, before they had them for dinner! The curved form and multi levels emulate the prows of ships indicating links with Bilboa's maritme past. Opened in 1997, it attracts thousands of tourists to Bilbao each year. It is just as impressive inside as out and is well worth a visit.

We couldn't believe, when we arrived the next day at the main entrance, there, sitting on guard, was Jeff Koon's huge flower covered puppy. The plants, mainly pink and white begonias, were obviously thriving in the Spanish summer. We first saw it in New York in 2000 and again in Sydney and here it was again. Having just explored the new Wynyard Quarter in Auckland before we left, we thought what a wonderful addtion to the area it would be.

Two works in particular left an impression. Alexandros Psychoulos' Body Milk was inspired by him searching the internet for 'Sex Bomb'. He came across the photo of a young woman suicide bomber who detonated herself in an Israeli supermarket. The work is knitted in pale pink string and shows what the supermarket looked like after the bomb went off. Knitted shelves have collapsed. Knitted boxes and crocheted cans are sprawled all over the floor while pale pink spaghetti strings powerfully suggest the carnage that resulted.

The second work was in a large gallery filled with rows of 40 individual lounge chairs, each in front of a TV, producing an intimate environment. On each TV a person was telling a story about their life. The artist, Kutlug Ataman, lived among the people in Kobu, a shanty town in the slums outside Istanbul. Once he had developed their trust he interviewed and filmed them, largely telling their own stories. One was of a young woman telling of how she was resigned to the arranged marriage that was about to occur, how she liked him but didn't love him but thought she would be happy. However she would much rather have been studying but, because her mother didn't have enough money, her younger sister was going to school instead. This, she thought, was a waste as she thought she was a better student than her sister. She was grateful that she could read and write as many of her friends couldn't. Many of the girls she knew weren't sent to school at all. I would haved loved to sat and listened to all the stories. I tried looking and listening to those next to me but it was a bit hard to concentrate on three stories at once.

Down the river from Bilbao is an incredible feat of engineering, the Hanging bridge. From photos we weren't sure what to expect. They showed two tall towers, one on either side of the river, joined by a bridge just short of the top. It turned out that a vehicle transporter, hung from the high bridge, moved cars over the river where they could just drive off. The iron structure, similar to that of the Eiffel Tower, was built in 1885 at that height and with that mechanism, so that sailing ships could pass underneath.

We've had great fun adapting ourselves to the Spanish timetable for eating. Breakfast is fine, lunch is at 2 but don't even think of going out for dinner until 8.30pm. Bars, bars everywhere and suddenly, at the witching hour, they change into restaurants.
Traveling by train through the mountains on our way to Madrid, the early morning mist lay in the valleys and the houses looked more like Swiss chalets. It rains a lot in the north so the landscape is quite green, with cows and sheep in the fields. Further on though, the view changed dramatically. The landscape was brown and parched with patches of green as a result of irrigation. Fields and fields of sunflowers drying off added some colour. Madrid, here we come!