Back to work....

Masía, acrylic on canvas, 75cm x 105cm

I am finding my way again, abstracting from architectural forms as structural armatures for the turbulent and complex energy fields that I find behind the appearances of things...a motif born of local observations of forms combined with the absorption of local color and light, transmuted through my vision...amplified and hopefully made luminous.  This first one is a bit like earlier work though I have sketches of more local forms that will make their way into more work coming...  In any case, I am working and feeling more confident, at home with my approach....my painting is best when is ephemeral, so says Isabel, a glimpse, a luminous memory of having partially seen something....the opposite of the kind of immutable stability and static presence of antique civilization. The tension between these two poles interests me greatly and I hope to do something with it in the work this month. 

Went to the market, bought fresh bread and wine (from a barrel into a portable container, vi negro...)  Had a vermut (vermouth) on ice with cold gambas with Isabel afterward...talked about the cultural differences between Spain and the U.S.  As a native Catalán who has lived in the U.S. much of her life, she remarked that while in the U.S. we embrace change, the Catalán and Spanish cultures are geared far more to stability, history, the unchanging...and that the landscape and pueblos are arranged in that way....the notion of wilderness is quite different.  Her mother, Sabina, age 84, remarking about the recent forest fires that killed several and occupied the news here for several days, that the (economically strapped) government should have cleaned the forests of downed wood before the fire....that essentially there are no forces of nature that the government should not be in control of.  The U.S. culture is, by comparison an adolescent, full of wild hope and expectation, still in touch with the uncontrollable aspects of our fate.  Yet we manage.

We watched Spanish TV last night of hand-wringing debates about what to do with the "crisis",  the economic need to streamline layers of government in the regional autonomies, to scale back on entitlements--and they despair that they won't be politically able to do so.