An Artist in Barcelona

October, 2005

  “The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way:  Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso.” – Joseph Campbell 
       
       The Fall semester was going smoothly and the freedom of being abroad suited me well. A group of us girls took the train for a long weekend in Barcelona- or more precisely said, “Barthelona.” We had booked a loft apartment somewhere in the city center, on an alley street, overlooking a panaderia (bakery) and a Café.  Two great big, shutter doors opened up to a small balcony overlooking an aging cobblestone street.  Mornings were idyllic. The rising sun cast a soft, warm hue, painting a picture as if we’d transported back in time. Enticing smells of freshly baking bread wafted throughout the street, beckoning breakfast.  Chocolate scents of roasting coffee mingled its nodes to my nose. The streets were coming alive with greetings of good mornings.  Buenas Dias.  Inhale.  Exhale. 
       We walked and made our way to The Picasso museum.  I was face first in surrealist paintings and sculptures. Different rooms portrayed different time periods of his work over the century. Loads of tourists made their way passing me, headsets on.  No doubt, they listened in their particular language to the artist’s history, and to interpretations on the works.  My mind ran on, I wonder how true that history is, who interpreted it, how it was changed or adapted. If Pablo himself only knew what those recordings were saying!  
       I was surrounded in blue, and drawn in by a simple nude, back exposed and hunched, and it occurred to me, I didn’t really know how to look at a painting.  School taught us language arts, math, and sciences, but not how to truly understand a painting.  As alluring as it is for myself and tourist alike to be told the meaning of these paintings, perhaps there was no need for understanding them at all.  Perhaps it is a present for the senses.  I meandered slowly in wonder and admiration, attempting to open myself and let the paintings speak to me and tell me of something unknown . . . 
       Something moved.  Something shifted.


      We turned down La Rambla street onto more adventure.  We passed an old opera house and on the doors were playbills of the current ballet. “Don Quixote de la Mancha- ballet meets Flamenco.” How perfect, we had all just read the classic tale in our Spanish studies class, and now a modern interpretation! We attended that evening and became entranced by classical ballet meeting the fieriness of Flamenco, as they danced the tale of the sad, love and chivalry-blinded character of Don Quixote and his sidekick.  Don Quixote was marked for his wild imagination. He himself even retold his own history. Here I was, in a different country, away from the structures in place in my life, that had before bound me to my norm. I had the ability to write, and create my own history, and here I was doing it.
       Picasso is quoted as saying of Barcelona: “there is where it all began. . . there is where I understood how far I could reach.” Little did I know, this would be true of me, Spain as the Launchpad to my breadth as a traveler, as a wanderer.