Learning to flow

Thursday  

Parque Maria Luisa

Finding this park was like stepping back from Edinburgh`s Princes Street and Royal Mile (with their teeming and relentlessly curious tourists) and finding myself in the Botanic Gardens. All in central Seville packs huge impact, and all the more so for its novelty to me. The realisation that here is a great and multifaceted culture with reverberations across the world, every bit as impactful as the "anglo" world, and about which I knew very little, and almost all of that relating to the guitar; my filter for "knowing" Spain. Cordoba, Cadiz, Granados, Sevilla are, for me, sound poems by Albeniz. Guitar notation I`ve puzzled out, practised and played. A Spain of the fingers and ears. And far beyond "the peninsula",  Piazolla`s Argentina, Lauro`s Venezuela, Barrios`s Paraguay !

So it was time to absorb my sensory overload in a calmer setting. 

Realising how limited my time was (this time) I saw that I could only ever focus on small details and, as I had done so very little research beforehand, these would be largely impressionistic and sensory. 

I found some shade underneath a giant eucalyptus tree by, it transpires, the Mudejar Pavilion. (This is now the Museum of Arts and Traditions of Seville). I took out those oil pastels. Found them to be quite acid, not easily mixable. Tried a kind of Synthetist style (and I have just looked this up and those 3 bullet points ring true: representing the outward appearance of natural forms; expressing the artist`s feelings for the subject; the purity of aesthetic considerations such as line, colour and form)

I`d been hoping for an exuberance, immediacy and flow. 

Some experiments later I returned to sit in the shade, pulled out a bag of purple plums, orange Mexican (it was the only name I felt confident to enunciate at the Triana market) cheese, Allemand bread (the purchase of which caused me to say Danke to the stall owner), red peppers, a giant tomato. Enjoying the heat, I idly watched ants as they carried ten times their body weight back to the nest. 

Mulling over my four oil pastel sketches I tried to understand what words like colour, composition, spontaneity, simplicity and flow mean, when translated into dabs of colour on paper. And what might they mean on a personal level? This man ( me ) who has spent contented years painstakingly and deliberately planning and executing precise and literal lino cuts, using black ink on white paper, how can he ( I ) learn to flow?

Evidently the tools aren`t enough.

Sitting in the Cafe Cappucino (opposite Carmen`s cigarette factory) snapping e-scooterists and cyclists as they blurred by, I reflected on "my" Europe; that this had always been "north west", On the other hand, Spain and its language was alien to the muscles of my tongue. All rasgueados and riffing drum. And yet that most Sevillian of music and dance, Flamenco, spoke directly to my heart and gut. As a guitarist I longed to have that precise, percussive facility. This morning I`d looked for Paco de Lucia`s likeness amongst the men I passed on the streets of Triana. 

Less than four hours now until I need to be in Avenue Carlos V for the Aeropuerta de Sevilla. Now is the time to luxuriate in this heat, this beautiful strangeness. To capture and hold as much as I can, to pack up and take away. Carpe Diem.  Because before too long I`ll be perched at a table in a vast food hall at Stansted International Arrivals, in cold and shabby UK. Waiting for the gates to open so we can all herd in through security clutching passports and boarding passes, our little bag of toiletries. Divesting ourselves of belts, shoes and a sense of dignity as our possessions are rolled through the least poetical liminal space on God`s earth. 

A week later:

Though back at work I`ve felt an urgency to scribble down my impressions before they all fade to nothing. Since returning I`ve pawed over my photographs and, using oil pastels along with water colour and a touch of coloured pencil, arrived at some images which begin to approach a sense of simplicity, that elusive flow and the deeply saturated light and colour I found in Seville.