In A Little While, 'from the studio' Will Be Coming To You From Espana
It's time I put a little distance between me and the lunacy that's the United States
A week from tomorrow Trump will be inaugurated for his second term. And at the same time he’s committing perjury on a bible, I’ll be flying to Spain. It just seemed like a good time for us to cash in some frequent flyer miles, book a cheap AirBnB, and live out of our backpacks for awhile. Three pairs of underwear. The same with socks. An extra pair of jeans. A very comfortable but leaky pair of shoes. A couple of cameras and a notebook.
Doesn’t it sound so very romantic?
It’s coincidental. Sue and me leaving on the 20th. It really is. It was one of those things when the app makes a suggestion that it would be cheaper if we flew out on this date, and I didn’t even make the connection until I began booking the flight.
Still, I took it as an omen. Let’s get out of here while everything heats up or cools down, let it do whatever it’s going to do.
But I do have my suspicions.
All I do know is we’re flying into Madrid, and we’re flying out of Barcelona. What will happen in-between, I have no idea.
I do know in Madrid I’ll be spending a lot of time in Reina Sofía. The Mapfre. The Thyssen. Among other contemporary art galleries and museums.**
And hardly any time, if any at all, in the Prado. All that religious and Renaissance nonsense. Those paintings and artists were for a different time.
**Pro Tip: The simplest way to understand the difference between modern and contemporary art is to consider time. Modern art is generally considered to have started around the 1860s and ended in the 1970s with the second generation of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art (Warhol), and all that. Contemporary art is composed of all the movements that came after, up until now.
In other words, no dead artists.
And I also know I’ll be especially seeking out one particular piece of art in Madrid.
Manuel Millares’s Las Palmas de Gran Canaria was the cause of a Jackson Pollock moment.
You read in art history books how so many of the Abstract Expressionists were stunned upon seeing Jackson Pollock’s work for the first time. It was so different. This piece absolutely riveted me in place. I couldn’t believe what this artist could do with a couple of pieces of scrap wood, some burlap, some house paint. How he completely upended, for me at least, everything that the art world said how art should be made, how content presented.
I was given a green light.
Question: Is there a piece of artwork that is special to you because it completely floored you the first time you experienced it? What was it?
It could be a painting.
A photograph.
A play.
A piece of music. A pop singer’s performance. An actor’s performance.
Don’t be shy. There are no wrong answers here. Please comment. So interested to hear responses.
What was it? It was a signed (!) photograph in a New York coffee shop in Greenwich Village. Beautiful, stunning. When was it? I’d guess it was 1956. Who made the photograph? Ansel Adams. What picture? Moon over Hernandez. The price? 350 dollars.
“Three hundred and fifty dollars? “
I exclaimed, loudly. Yep. A couple of decades later unsigned ones were sold for 40 thousand bucks.