May 19, 2009 @ 8:09 am | Filed under: Art, Books, Math
Jane really appreciates the great optical illusions and Escher-art book suggestions. She has added more than a few promising titles to her birthday wish list, so perhaps we’ll have some reviews to share in the months ahead. In the meantime, here’s a nifty YouTube clip we found. Jane was looking for help in drawing “impossible shapes”; I didn’t know what she meant until she showed me pictures in the Harold Jacobs Mathematics book. (Highly recommended, by the way—we have never used the Jacobs books as textbooks, but rather they have been ‘fun reading’ for Jane and others for several years. She has Mathematics: A Human Endeavor and the algebra book, and actually the Jacobs geometry book is item number one on her birthday list.)
Back to the video clip. Jane spent a good bit of time yesterday working out how to draw the “impossible triangle.” This morning we found this Paint tutorial demonstrating that triangle and several other “impossible” shapes. Simple and fun.
“What brand are your sketchbooks? They look wonderfully sturdy and kid-friendly. I have never thought to take watercolors outside, your pictures make it look so simple (much simpler than inside painting) I must try it.”
We’re using these 8×8″ recycled sketchbooks from Stubby Pencil Studio. We like the small, square shape and the sturdy cardboard covers (plain brown, easily decorated). I bought them to give the kids for Christmas and forgot about them. I remembered I’d also bought and forgotten these neato-bandito “Smencils“—#2 pencils with yummy scents like cinnamon, orange, and root beer—and when I dug the box out from under my bed where I’d hidden it, the sketchbooks were there too, a nice surprise.
As for our outdoor painting supplies, the watercolors are just the cheap Crayola sets.
When my older kids were little, I read lots and lots about the benefits of providing children with really high quality art supplies. In some cases, I still agree: Prismacolor colored pencils are worlds better than your drugstore variety. The lead is so creamy and blendable. They’re expensive but they last a long time—we’re on our second set of 72 colors in over ten years.
But watercolors? Real watercolor paper makes a huge difference, but it’s expensive; that’s one reason I was so taken with Jenn’s idea to cut it into smaller, postcard-sized pieces. But when it comes to the paints themselves, well, I’ve been the high-quality route, absorbed the persuasive literature that talks about rich pigments and translucent hues; bought the pricey tubes of red, yellow, blue; collected jars for mixing colors; watched my children squeeze out too much paint and gleefully swirl it into an expensive puddle of mud-colored glop.
Lesson learned. The 99 cent Roseart or Crayola sets work just fine. In fact, dare I say I think my preschoolers like them better? Mixing colors is fun, but there is nothing quite so appealing as that bright rainbow of pretty paint ovals all in a row. When Wonderboy and Rilla make a mess of their paints, Jane cleans them up with a rag and they’re practically good as new.
Jane’s taking a watercolors class herself, and for that I was happy to buy nice quality paints. But for casual backyard painting for my other five kids? No more tubes.
One last note—we really like to use painting boards under our paper. A long time ago I bought a box of dry-erase markerboards very cheap. They were scratch-and-dent discount items. I wish I could remember the website. Anyway, these make fabulous painting boards. They clean up easily, if you’re inclined to wipe them down. We usually aren’t.
August 14, 2008 @ 6:33 am | Filed under: Art, Books
A few remarks on things we’ve read or are reading around here…
What Makes a Raphael a Raphael by Richard Muhlberger. About ten years ago, I heard that the What Makes a… series was going out of print and I snapped up the five titles I could find. I think they’ve since been reissued with new covers, so they’re not all lost and gone as I feared they would be. But I’m glad I made the purchase way back then. We love these books. They are slim paperbacks will full-color reproductions of paintings, many paintings, by the artist in question. The text is readable and engaging and in addition to providing biographical information about the artist, Muhlberger spends a lot of time taking close looks at individual paintings, discussing materials, technique, composition, and historical context in clear and vivid language. Beanie, my current seven-year-old, listens raptly. We pulled the Raphael book off the shelf on a whim a week or two ago, and several mornings have found the two of us poring over the details of one of the paintings in this book. Beanie will linger over the volume long after the little ones have called me away. Jane, overhearing scraps of our discussion, was herself drawn in and has been taking her own turn puzzling out the symbols Raphael uses to identify certain saints in his religious artwork.
The St. George painting made us think, of course, of Margaret Hodges’s classic picture book, St. George and the Dragon. May I just say (for the thousandth time) how much I adore Trina Schart Hyman‘s work? We have an edition of Peter Pan which she illustrated, and Rose has read it to tatters—but we can’t part with it, taped up and raggedy as it is. Rose says that no one else draws the Lost Boys properly. I understand exactly how she feels, because as long as I live, there will be only one edition of The Secret Garden for me, and that’s the one illustrated by Tasha Tudor.
At the orthodontist’s office yesterday, Rose and Bean were asked to fill out questionaires about their favorite things and special talents. (I could write a whole post about those questionaires: good grief.) Rose was somewhat tortured by the small blank asking for her favorite book (“It’s impossible, Mom!”) and finally came to a compromise between space and reality by squeezing in Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. It pained her, though, to abridge the title of the latter in that fashion. Every true fan knows it’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Rose has not encountered many fill-in-the-blank experiences in her life, and she was not impressed by this one.
I can’t begin to keep up with Jane’s reading lists anymore. I make mental notes of the piles I see on end tables and bedsides around the house. Lately there’s a lot of James Herriot and Rick Riordan. Right here beside me on the sofa is Shannon Hale’s Princess Academy, which Scott, Jane, and Rose have all enjoyed, but I haven’t read yet myself. Rose keeps going back to Gail Carson Levine’s Fairy Dust and the Questfor the Egg, which came by surprise from Uncle Jay last week and was jubilantly celebrated by all three girls. It had been a library favorite for months. We have a number of Levine’s earlier fairy tale books because Gail and I used to have the same editor at HarperCollins, and Alix kept me well supplied with Gail’s latest. Ah, those were the days.
I’m reading Understood Betsy to Rose and Beanie: one of our family’s favorite read-alouds ever. Beanie was about Rilla’s age the last time we enjoyed this book aloud. She doesn’t remember it at all, of course, and so I get the fun all over again of hearing the chuckles and giggles in all the right places. The first time I read this book aloud, Jane was about five years old. Scott was working at home in those days, writing, and I remember how he came out of his office for a cup of coffee and got sucked into the story, and that was the end of his work session for that day. After that I was adjured to save the read-aloud time for when he could join us. (The same thing happened with By the Great Horn Spoon years later.)
At bedtime, Scott is reading Watership Down to the younger girls for the second time in…a year? Two years? Doesn’t matter how long (or short) a time ago it was: it was time again. All three decreed it.
This may explain why Beanie came staggering out from bed yesterday morning and said, “Mommy, I just had the most realistic dream. We were all rabbits…”
Particularly Cool Stuff My Kids and I Have Learned a Ton From or Just Plain Had a Good Time With:
Settlers of Catan, the board game. Jane got this for Christmas last year. We’ve been obsessed ever since. Except when our friends hijack it and keep it for weeks because it is that great a game.
Signing Time DVDs. Catchy songs, immensely useful vocabulary in American Sign Language. I trumpet these wherever I go. We talk about Rachel like she’s one of the family.
Prismacolor colored pencils. Indispensable. I was amused to see that Jane mentioned them in the first line of her “I Am From” poem. She’s right; they have helped color the picture of her life.
Uncle Josh’s Outline Map CD-Rom. Because maps are cool, and maps you can color (with Prismacolor pencils, hey!) are even cooler. The kids are constantly asking me to print out a map of somewhere or other. You can find other outline maps available online (for free), but I like Josh’s for clarity. And once when I had a problem opening a particular map (it’s a PDF file), I called the help number and it was Uncle Josh himself, a most amiable gentleman, who quickly solved my problem.
The Global Puzzle. Big! Very big! Will take over your dinner table! (So clear off that laundry.)
Set. It may annoy you that your eight-year-old will be quicker at spotting the patterns in this card game than you will. There’s a free daily online version as well.
Quiddler. Like Scrabble, only with cards. This, too, can be played online.
Chronology, the game. Like Trivial Pursuit, only with history.
Speaking of online games: the BBC History Game site is awfully fun.
And Jane was fairly addicted to Absurd Math for a while there. Need more free math puzzles? Nick’s got a bunch.
A Case of Red Herrings and Mind Benders. Logic and problem-solving puzzles: a fun way to pass the time on long car trips or in waiting rooms.
Zoombinis Logical Journey computer game and sequels. Stretch your brain trying to get the little Zoombinis to a village where they can bounce in peace.
Wild Goose Science Kits. Fun experiments with a low mess factor. Note to self: remember the Wild Goose Crime Kit come Christmastime. (Sadly, these are no longer available. Wild Science offers similar kits.)
If the scope sparks an interest in dissection, there’s a way to do it online with no actual innards involved: Froguts! The site has a couple of free demos to occupy you while you save up for the full version. (Which I haven’t seen yet, but it does look cool.) HT: Karen Edmisten.
Klutz Books. Over the years, we’ve explored: knitting, embroidery, origami, magic, Sculpey, paper collage, paper dolls, beadlings, and foam shapes. Look under any piece of furniture in my house and you will find remnants of all of the above.
Which reminds me: Sculpey polymer clay. Is it possible to get through a day without some? My children think not.
Refrigerator poetry magnets. I gave Scott the Shakespearean set a couple of Christmases ago. Note to self: You are not as brilliant as you think! You were an English major, for Pete’s sake, with a minor in drama. Thou knowest full well old William was a bawdy fellow. If you don’t want your little ones writing poems about codpieces, stick to the basic version. But oh how I enjoy the messages Scott leaves for me to find and then pretends he doesn’t know who wrote them:
I am so in love with my delicate wench.
And of course of course of course, Jim Weiss story CDs. I rave about these every chance I get because they have added such riches to my children’s imaginations. For years, they have listened to Jim’s stories after lights-out. Greek myths, Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, folk and fairy tales, the Arabian Nights, the Jungle Book: of such stuff are dreams woven.
After lunch both Monday and yesterday, I cleared the table and brought out a stack of drawing paper and our best crayons, and something magical happened. This was a notion inspired by a passage in Amanda Soule’s book, The Creative Family, about how in her home they have a regular “family drawing time.” That made me realize it had been a long, long time since the girls and I all sat down to draw together. We used to do this regularly, but you know: babies come along and the household rhythm changes.
I remember long, long ago on the CCM list, Leonie wrote about how whenever she would sit down with her watercolor pencils and nature journal, her boys would flock to the table clamoring for their own journals. There was no better, faster way to get her kids interested in an activity than in doing it herself. I had tiny little girls then, and I took Leonie’s wisdom to heart. If I draw it/knit it/bake it/sculpt it, they will come. Far better than saying “Why don’t you…(do this cool activity)” is simply to become engaged in it myself. It’s like strewing your own self.
So I sat down at the table and whoosh, I was a child magnet. For the next hour, all five kids were happily drawing pictures with me. No bickering, not even over the blue block crayon that makes the best sky! Amazing. We put on the Elgar cello concerto and Rose decreed that the perfect music to draw to. I didn’t know what to draw, so I (clumsily) illustrated a scene from a story we’d read before lunch. They really liked my depiction of the wind tangled in a treetop (from Medio Pollito, the Half Chick). Beanie started to draw a fox and decided it looked like a cave painting, so she embellished with a deer and a python and torches on the cave walls. Rose drew a rose-covered garden gate, so lovely, and Jane’s snail among flowers was quite charming. Wonderboy and Rilla filled up pages of scribbles.
Yesterday they all (save Jane, who saw a chance to slip away with the new Penderwicks book, and who can blame her?) wanted a repeat performance. “We should do this every day,” declared Rose. I quite agree.
Sunday. Our last full day in Barcelona. Scott was still tied to his two shifts of portfolio review. I knew exactly where I wanted to spend the morning: in the Gothic Quarter, and at the cathedral most especially. I had skirted the fringes of the Gothic Quarter the afternoon before, when I slipped out for a few hours between lunch and dinner to visit a Gaudi house (Casa Batilo) and the Music Palace, and had walked south from the Palace in search of a subway station. I could have kept on walking and I’d have been quite close to the cathedral, but it was late in the day and I knew Scott would be finishing up at the con soon. It made sense to save the cathedral for Sunday Mass anyway.
And so it was that I set off in a gray mist on Sunday morning, pink umbrella overhead. A short subway ride later, there I was. When I say “cathedral,” I mean the old Gothic church, fourteenth-century I think, not the Gaudi church-in-progress I raved about yesterday.
The gray day seemed fitting for this solemn old church. I was just in time for Mass, and it was sort of thrilling to be able to follow along even though the service was in Catalan.
I squeezed in a few photos during the five minutes between Masses, but not many. There was not much light, anyway. But I loved this church: loved it with a completely different kind of admiration than the soaring, trembling attachment I’d felt to Sagrada Familia the day before. The old cathedral is quiet, somber, majestic, heavy with the prayers of millions who have passed through its doors. It is full of a peaceful resignation, a grave courtesy, a sense of comfort in the familiar, the time-tested, the faith that endures.
I loved the old-world feel of the narrow alleys outside
and the ornaments, like this unicorn
and the windows, especially the windows. I took a great many window photographs.
The cloister was a serene place full of shrines for many saints, connected around a courtyard by high-roofed walkways.
My favorite statues were up in the main sanctuary: Our Lady of Happy Childbirth was a particularly lovely one, and I lit a candle for a friend there.
My pictures of the famous “Black Madonna” did not come out very well.
I loved the Immaculate Conception shrine very much.
After a very long time, I tore myself away from the cathedral. I wandered over to La Rambla, the wide pedestrian walkway lined with flower vendors and shops.
La Rambla is famous for its “living statues.” Can you spot the one in this photo?
It was hilarious to watch him startle scrutinizing passersby by whipping out his pistol when they came close.
More art! A Miro mosaic in the sidewalk.
Outdoor cheese stall down a side street.
I was amused, later, to find this same photo (only better) in a guidebook. Because, you know, I didn’t read any guidebooks until I was on the plane coming home. Brilliant!
The rest of my Gothic Quarter pictures begin here at Flickr.
Friday night there was a party at the hotel for all us comic-convention guests. It was an award ceremony in Spanish for Spanish artists, and there was a lot of very loud music and giant video screen and inscrutable finger foods. Certain shameless ingrates tried to slip away from this party for a romantic evening out, just the two of them, all alone in a foreign country halfway around the world from the five children they had never ever before left for more than a night, but these ingrates were caught and picked up by the scruff of the neck and deposited back in the middle of the very loud music and the fish-flavored rice.
Honestly, the nerve of some people.
After the party, a group of artists went out to a club, but these particular ingrates had had their fill of shouting small talk in a noisy setting, so they hatched an alternative plan with certain British chums and slipped stealthily downstairs to the piano bar. Unfortunately it turned out the British chums hadn’t actually been able to hear the whispered plan above the party din, and the smiling and nodding and exclamations of “Brilliant!” was more of a general amiability and not so much an assent to The Secret Plan. The two ingrates, therefore, found themselves alone in the empty and quiet piano bar; and though the British lads were missed, quiet solitude was not at all a distressing turn of events.
Eventually the charming Peter Bagge strolled in and joined the contented couple for a drink and some fine conversation. Just another lovely evening in the Barcelona Catalonia Plaza.
The next morning saw Scott back at his desk in the editors’ corner of the convention hall. I fitted my camera out with fresh batteries and headed out to see, at long last, Gaudi’s cathedral-in-progress, La Sagrada Familia—the Temple of the Holy Family.
This enormous church was begun in the 1880s and is still under construction. There is a long way to go. I walked in thinking it was a pity about all those cranes and all that scaffolding, and I sure hope they get this thing finished up soon. I walked out believing in my bones that it doesn’t matter how long it takes to finish. The work is part of the artistry. The making is part of the magic. This is a magnum opus taking shape before our eyes, like the raising of the great cathedrals of old, when generations of craftsman devoted their lives to creating something magnificent for the glory of God. Here, too, we have families of artisans in which the craft is passed down from grandfather to father to son: sculptors and stonemasons, glassworkers and engineers. It’s a grand work, an epic work: and there is love going into every inch of the cathedral. Every small detail has significance, has been pondered and planned. You could spend a lifetime ‘unpacking’ the symbolism.
Gaudi was quite a young and relatively untried architect—but already his genius and vision was obvious to his peers—when he was hired to replace the cathedral’s original designer, one year into construction. The crypt had already been dug, but the rest of the design is Gaudi’s, every arch, column, window, and spire. Through the decades that followed, even when he was taking commissions to design other buildings, the work of Sagrada Familia remained close to his heart. In 1914, with most of his loved ones dead and gone, he devoted himself full time to the church. He knew he would not live to see its completion and wanted to leave a complete and thorough record of plans and models for those who would follow him. He poured the last 12 years of his life into this labor of love, and even though many of his plans were destroyed in a fire during the Spanish Civil War ten years after his death, his plaster models and other records survived.
He envisioned an edifice with 18 spires rising high above the city, the tallest (and as yet unbuilt) tower high enough to be seen from anywhere in town—and yet a little bit smaller than Montjuic, the mountain from which I first glimpsed Sagrada Familia’s spires. Man’s creation, Gaudi said, ought not to pridefully surpass God’s.
The church will have four facades. Two of them are completed, and a third seemed well along, but it was hidden behind scaffolding. The fourth and final facade will be the Glory Portal and Gaudi’s vision for that entrance is breathtaking. The two facades that I saw were on opposite sides of the building: the Passion Facade and the Nativity Facade. Both are stunning and it’s hard to know where to begin talking about them.
Here’s how I saw it first: head tilted back in awe.
You will not be terribly impressed by my photos. There are better images all over the internet. I really need to go back: that first day I was too blown away to think like a photographer.
Nativity facade, left and center porticos. (Left is the Joseph portico; center is the Jesus portico. Why oh why didn’t I get a shot of the Mary one?)
(Because I didn’t know until later what I was looking at. I read all about the church on the plane coming home.)
Detail, Joseph facade. Jesus brings his foster-father a wounded dove; his grandparents St. Anne and St. Joachim look on. Note the rosaries hanging beside them. There is a wealth of beautiful detail here. The Nativity facade portrays scenes from the birth and young life of Christ.
Gaudi intended the cathedral to be a visual Bible of sorts, portraying the entire gospel on its stone walls. And one of the strange things for me was to be viewing these scenes in the midst of a comic book convention: I’d had the same sensation in the mural rooms at the Museum the day before. All of this is sequential art, stories unfolding in panel after panel, just like modern-day comics. Gaudi’s “stories” even contain a good deal of text, like comic-book captions. Words are carved all over the stone, ribbons and banners proclaiming “Hosannah” and “Gloria in excelsis deo” and such.
Scene from Jesus portico, over the main doors. Joseph and Mary present the infant Jesus while the Magi and angels look on. The big column on the left separates the Joseph and Jesus porticoes. There’s another on the Mary side. At the base of these columns are two large tortoises: one a sea turtle and one a land tortoise, the former facing the sea and the latter facing the mountains, to signify unchangingness and eternity.
Also note the JHS symbol inside the crown of thorns on the wrought-iron cross.
Another rosary is draped over the top of the window.
You see how I could easily keep this up all day. There is too much to show and tell!
Atop these spires are bunches of fruit made of sparkling Venetian glass—fruit to symbolize abundance and fertility. Gaudi’s work—all of it, not just this cathedral—is full of images and motifs from nature. The gargoyles on this church, instead of being monsters and demons, are reptiles and amphibians, creatures associated with evil. Gargoyles are meant to siphon rainwater off the roof; Sagrada Familia’s gargoyles are salamanders, serpents, lizards, frogs—all facing downward, fleeing the Mary symbol on the “Star of the Sea” spire which is yet to be built.
There will be 18 towers in all: 12 for the apostles, 4 taller ones for the four gospel-writers, 1 taller still for Mary, and the tallest of all for Jesus. At a projected 170 meters, it will be taller than the great cathedral in Cologne, Germany, which I had the good fortune to visit at age 14—and, as I mentioned above, one meter shorter than Montjuic.
Four of the apostle spires above Nativity portico.
The church is shaped like a Latin cross, rounded at the top end. The cross arms are the Nativity and Passion Porticos, facing east and west respectively. The Glory facade will face south. The north end, the nave end, is dedicated to Mary with a special chapel.
That end, though, was the one covered by scaffolding. I walked around to the west side and paid my entrance donation to visit the interior through the Passion portico.
The Passion facade. I listened to an audio recording by the sculptor who designed these figures. He said he didn’t want to try to imitate or duplicate Gaudi, but rather to create something in keeping with Gaudi’s vision which was also true to his own work, his own vision. My pictures come nowhere near to conveying the power and solemnity of these stark, sorrowful figures.
The skulls at Christ’s feet really got to me.
Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss. Note the serpent uncoiling from beneath Judas’s robe. On the wall behind them is a crytogram; can you figure it out? To the right, the scourging at the pillar.
Here’s a better look at the cryptogram.
The columns holding up this portico are like bones.
There is a particularly horrific depiction of the slaughter of the innocents. I was sure I had a photo, but I can’t find it. You can view an image here, but be warned: it’s pretty brutal. Um, I guess that would be obvious from the subject matter. That poor mother’s anguish will be burned into my heart forever.
Oh my, this is a very, very long post, and I haven’t even gone inside yet. And inside: oh, the beauty! But I think I will end this now. Perhaps I’ll write about the interior later. For now, let me leave you with just a few last pictures: a rose window from inside, and columns rising on the Glory facade without.
Thursday evening, after I returned to the hotel from my first art museum visit, I met Scott in the lobby with a crowd of artists and writers. That evening set the tone for the rest of the trip: each night we gathered in the piano bar around seven or eight (there was a piano but no pianist) for lively conversation until moving en masse to the dining room at 9:30. Dinner stretched to midnight every night, and then the party usually moved back to the piano bar until the wee hours of the morning. I loved the opportunity to swap stories with all these other creative folks.
I guess it was Thursday at dinner that we first met Andy Diggle and Jock, the former a British writer and the latter a British artist who have collaborated on many projects. Jock is the studio-mate of one of Scott’s very favorite artists (and people), Lee Garbett, who pencils Midnighter. Scott was bummed that Lee wouldn’t be at the con (but for the best of reasons; he had a one-week-old son at home), but was looking forward to meeting Jock and Andy, whose work he loves. The four of us hit it off right away, and the truth is we liked them both so much that I’m in danger here of gushing in the most embarrassing manner. So let me just say that they are two of the nicest, smartest, funniest guys I’ve ever met (reminded me of Scott’s brothers, if Scott’s brothers were artsy and had cool accents), and we loved them to pieces and I’m dying to meet their wives and children, and I hope our families will be best friends forever.
(Good thing I decided not to embarrass myself with the gushing.)
Friday morning we meant to get an early start. Scott didn’t have to start portfolio review until 5—his one free day of the week. But when dinner isn’t over until 12:30 in the morning, the words “early start” are relative. It was close to eleven, I think, when we finally set off for the elevator, intending to seek out some Gaudi architecture. After almost 48 hours in Barcelona, it was high time.
My plan was to visit La Sagrada Familia first. But in the elevator lobby we bumped into Tim Sale and his friend and translator Diego, who sold us on a section of town called Park Güell (we thought he was saying Parkway, so now you know how to pronounce it).
He mentioned a salamander sculpture, and I pulled out my guideboook and pointed to the cover. “This one?” “That’s it,” he said. He told us we could get there by subway and there would be a short walk “up to the Park.” With moving staircases, he added. We hopped into the elevator and stopped by the front desk to ask for subway directions. There’s a station directly outside the hotel, and the line we needed makes a stop there. The hotel clerk told us which stop to take. There would be signs, he said, pointing the way to Park Güell.
A nice Cockney man (whose father, he told us, lives in Alaska) helped us navigate the ticket machine and subway gates. We found our train and enjoyed the ride. Once out of the subway, we did indeed see the signs pointing us toward the Park. But it seems Diego, who is by all accounts a brilliant linguist, one of the best translators in all of Spain, had nevertheless omitted some tiny little words from his description: he should have said “up A VERY STEEP MOUNTAIN to the Park.” And those moving staircases? Half of them were out of order. We huffed and puffed our way to the top—
Going up
Looking down
—and were rewarded with excellent views of the city.
At the summit of the hill are stone steps leading up to three stone crosses.
From this perch we could see the spires of La Sagrada Familia, and the green lanes of the avenue known as La Rambla leading down to the sea. It had begun to rain by this time, but only a drizzle. I had my pricey pink umbrella. Scott got wet.
La Sagrada Familia on the right, and the building called Torre Agbar on the left
The wider green belt on the left is La Rambla, a pedestrian walkway lined with shops.
From far below us floated up the strains of trumpet music: the song selections amused me. Raindrops Are Falling on My Head, Singing in the Rain…I wondered if the musician was playing at a restaurant somewhere on the streets below.
Despite the rain, this was a beautiful place—but where was the Gaudi? After some uncertainty over which path to take, we tramped through dripping woods and down a dirt lane. A ripple of brightly colored mosaic railing told us we’d found the right place. The path took us to a wide, flat terrace with the undulating mosaic rail curving round.
And there too we found the trumpet player: a busker leaning against the curved wall just out of the rain. I dropped a euro in his trumpet case, and he smiled wide and thanked me. He was from Cuba, he told us, and has a cousin in California. He’s been in Barcelona for six months. “Do you know the song I was playing?” he asked me, and I said, “No, but when I was up on the hill I heard you playing “Raindrops Are Falling on My Head,” and it made me smile.” He grinned broadly and said, “You knew!” Then he said he’d play a song just for us, a little Sinatra. It was “Fly Me to the Moon,” which I sing to my kids all the time. I laughed and clapped and he bobbed his trumpet up and down in reply, adding a little blast at the end to startle some children who were seeming a little too interested in his heap of change.
We walked to the edge of the terrace and looked down upon two buildings that were unmistakably Gaudi designs. A tall blue-and-white mosaic spire rose from a house right out of fairyland, or maybe candyland. Gaudi’s use of mosaic to ornament his structures is at once whimsical and breathtaking. (Scott, reading this, snorts: “Fairyland? More like Dr. Seuss on acid.”)
I wish the colors were true in these photos. The overcast day dulled the pictures, but even through the drizzle the real mosaics gleamed bright and vivid as jewels. Rich blues, greens, golds, crimsons…Everywhere we looked, we gasped. Every tiny detail is original and magical.
Scott thought the blue-and-white spire looked made of fabric.
Eventually we tore ourselves away from the view and followed some more steps down to a lower level, where we discovered we’d only just begun to see the wonders of Park Güell.
Below the terrace we were standing on is a…I don’t know what to call it. Domed area with many columns. The terrace forms its ceiling. That ceiling is like nothing else on earth. Concave circles side by side, like an Escher painting, circles done in mosaic. Most of them are a sort of iridescent tile, with here and there a dazzlingly bright ring of jewels.
Another staircase leads down, presided over by my old friend the salamander.
The main staircase. The big walls on either side are ornamented with the most beautiful tiles that have been broken and reassembled as mosaics in a repetition of the undulated surface used all over the park. Each colorful square has a concave shape, irresistible to the hands and soothing to the eyes.
You can find much better pictures on Flickr and elsewhere. My camera batteries died partway through this visit, and the light was against me, so I didn’t get the perfect shots I wanted. But it’s a gorgeous place. It was intended to be a housing development of sorts, designed by Gaudi. The development never got off the ground, but later Gaudi bought one of the houses himself—not one of the ones in these pictures, which aren’t full-scale houses; there are two other buildings on the park grounds, designed by other architects, and it was one of these that Gaudi bought to live in with his elderly father. We toured it, but they didn’t allow photos. Not that it mattered for my camera at that point. I recharged them in the room, though, for the next day’s big outing: La Sagrada Familia.
While Scott worked his evening portfolio review shift, I headed back up the many many steps to the Palau Nacional.
Don’t be fooled. These are only some of the steps.
The admissions clerk told me my ticket was valid for two days, which was a good thing because that first evening, I only had time to visit one floor. I began with the upper story, the modern art wings. This museum, the National Art Museum of Catalonia, is one of the best art museums I’ve ever visited.
The building is a work of art in its own right.
Ceiling.
Auditorium.
Main gallery, looking up toward the dome.
Main gallery.
I wish I could post images of all the paintings and sculpture that blew me away. Artists new to me were Nicolau Raurich and Lluis Rigalt, both of whom had a way of painting luminous skies that reminded me of Maxfield Parrish.
Ruins by Rigalt
I had heard of Fortuny and Joaquim Mir, but had never seen much of their work. Fortuny’s The Battle of Tetuan filled an entire wall and was overwhelming in its scope and detail. Hundreds of small stories are being played out there in the larger battle scene. I loved the wealth of detail in his Spanish Wedding, too. You can view images of these at the MNAC website, but the images (even when you click to enlarge) are too small to show off Fortuny’s genius.
There were a few small Picassos (I never did make it to the Picasso Museum, alas) and one Dali sketch. A larger Dali painting was on loan to another museum. I loved this sculpture by Llimona:
First Holy Communion
And this one by Claraso:
Eve
I knew my girls would love this dreamy painting by Joán Brull:
Reverie
Let me jump ahead now to Friday evening, when I returned for a few hours. This time I wandered through the rooms of religious art on the ground floor. Oh my goodness. Incredible sights to see there. Entire rooms are devoted to murals (or fragments of murals) recovered from old churches across Spain. These once vivid paintings are now faded and patchy, but you get a good sense of their majesty. The museum has replicated the size and shape of the interiors the murals once inhabited: room after room of domed ceilings and arched entrances. Hushed and full of shadows, these are solemn, contemplative spaces, illumined by scenes from the life of Christ in dusky blues and faded golds.
Other rooms contained ornate triptychs and gold-embellished paintings. The collections of Gothic and Romanesque religious art are world-famous, apparently. I can’t begin to do these collections justice, so I’m not even going to try. One image that I saw reprinted all over the place on postcards and book covers was the Christ figure from this twelfth-century altar frontal:
Apostles Frontal from La Seu d’Urgell
My favorite piece of religious art was this magnificent Counter-Reformation painting by Juan de Zurbarán.
Immaculate Conception
In the bookshop I bought a museum guide that contains images of almost everything in the museum, and it’s a good thing I did, because I’d have forgotten most of it already. I hope to track down prints of some of the paintings I loved, but I have to say a preliminary search has not yielded much fruit.
I tore myself away when the museum closed at seven. I knew Scott would be just getting off his shift at the con on the avenue down below. And now comes one of the most magical moments of the whole trip. I started down the first long flight of steps, marveling at how golden and beautiful the evening was and yet a bit wistful that there was an avenue of fountains ahead of me and all of them stilled. And just then, as the stairs took me past the highest fountain—it whooshed into life. Really. It was a waterfall, and as I traveled down the next few steps, the second tier of the waterfall burst over the ledge in a glittering spray. A few more steps, another waterfall—the awakening of the fountains keeping pace with my steps each time. It made me laugh out loud, it was so gorgeously serendipitious. It was like I was a Disney princess. I reached the broad flat level halfway down the hill, where the huge “Magic Fountain” fills the space. A small crowd had gathered round it and as I drew near, there was a sound like the intake of breath and then shhhh, up it came, the water arcing high above our heads from dozens of jets. And not just water, but music and lights. It opened with Clair de Lune, and I was not the only person there who got choked up.
But I didn’t have my camera with me. I know, I know. I had already been up Montjuic four times by this point and thought I’d snapped everything I could possibly snap. But here’s a YouTube clip from two years ago.
, the board game. Jane got this for Christmas last year. We’ve been obsessed ever since. Except when our friends hijack it and keep it for weeks because it is that great a game.
