I have lived in the same old stone house on a rocky mountainside above a village outside Granada for fifty years. For forty of them I have worked in the same studio which sits on a terrace beneath the house. My artwork in the early days was limited to painting. The printmaking came later, in the late 70s, after I was selected to participate in the printmaking program that master printmaker, José García Lomas (Pepe Lomas) was running for the Rodríguez-Acosta Foundation in Granada. I worked there, under his guidance for almost three years. Pepe’s great merit was that he didn’t tell his students what to do. He helped them do it.
When the Foundation closed in 1980, I bought one of the etching presses and enough tables, equipment and materials to set up a print workshop in my studio. (I still use some of those inks. They had wonderful quality in those days.) I had 50 square meters of space in the studio, ample for installing a printmaking workshop, but it didn’t leave much room for painting. Along with that hindrance, my printmaking courses quickly gained popularity with artists from around the world. My husband, Mike, insisted on making me a website for my workshops. I thought that was ridiculous(!) but he went ahead with it and it started to function. Before long I had neither the space, the time, nor the disposition for painting. But I always missed it sorely. It only took me 40 years to get back to paint in a serious way. It was in a three-month period before of my recent exhibition. That mini-retrospective reignited my passion for paint.
Maureen and Juan, plotting in the plaza
It was a time when I didn’t have any printmaking students, time all to myself. I took advantage to reserve the big exhibit space on the top floor of our town hall. Our mayor is an art lover, always willing to collaborate. He’s even talking about building a municipal art museum. That would be quite a feat in a village of 1,400 people. The mayor was delighted because the show would coincide with our village’s annual cultural week. Once I had secured the dates—virtually the whole month of August—I got to work on a few paintings that needed finishing. In three months I did that and also produced two more large paintings.
I was delighted with myself. Painting had never seemed so natural. I went to visit the gallery space and found it too big for the amount of work I had, so I talked with Juan Vida, a painter friend of ours who came to live in our village about 25 years ago, and proposed that we exhibit together. I am convinced that our two approaches to oil painting complemented each other and made for a more interesting exposition. The show attracted a rich mix of people, both villagers and outsiders. I didn’t expect to see so many of our neighbors nor the level of their enthusiasm for art. I found that surprise uplifting.
It’s only an eight-kilometer (five-mile) drive from Granada to our village and a lot of Granadinos came out to see the show. Juan Vida’s presence attracted a lot of them. He’s a well-known painter in Granada and further afield. We also got a big boost when Antonio Arenas, a reporter from Ideal, one of the Granada local papers, came out to cover the show and produced a big piece on it which included an interview with me in text and video, along with clippings from previous events. Without Antonio’s help, we wouldn’t have had so many visitors. (He had a big morning in our village. Here are some links to his report, in Spanish, though the images are images: https://bit.ly/30HQ7FE, this one to the exhibition, https://bit.ly/3YLA26i, this one to my illustrated cookery book.
As the exhibition advanced, a couple of old friends cornered me and said, “Maureen, you look great. We really love your new work. How do you do it?” I feel better because I’m painting again. After 40 years dedicated almost exclusively to printmaking, I finally got a few months free. In theory, I don’t do print workshops any more, but people keep turning up for one-on-one coaching, and I have trouble saying no. During my printmaking career, when I did occasionally go into the studio to paint, I could not get inspired. It seemed that my painting days were over. That changed thanks to last month’s exhibition of paintings that I never gotten around to exhibiting before, plus the new ones, which met with a warm welcome.
I realized in the run-up to the exhibition that I needed to finish some of the paintings for the show—work from 1984-2023. I was lucky that I didn’t have any artists coming for printmaking courses till late autumn. So I was free to get to work. I soon re-discovered that I knew how to paint—and how much I enjoyed it. After all that time hardly touching paint on canvas it felt as if I was painting better than ever. Also, I realized that the work I had done in printmaking over the years had refined my approach to painting, which seems easier now. At bottom, there’s not so much difference between painting and printmaking. It’s all about the image.
Tending the show for two hours, mornings and evenings, was a lot of work, but Mike drove me down and back twice every day. The town hall is only about a kilometer away from our house, but it is downhill, which after a long day’s work becomes uphill. With time on my hands, I put together an improvised visitors’ book and encouraged people to write their impressions of the show in it. That revealed some delightful surprises. Some of our village neighbors actually painted themselves. And the children were surprisingly insightful. They almost always chose the best paintings and wrote thoughtful comments in the visitors’ book, observations that were relevant and sincere. It made me proud of them. My pueblo inspired me.
I also got advice and encouragement from Juan Vida, who created the sweet little catalogue and the posters. Juan has exhibited more than I have and he was generous with his advice. He edited the number of paintings I should hang and helped with hanging them. The friendship we had shared from our days of anti-Franco activism was revitalized, something wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for exhibiting together.
I closed the gallery doors every night at 10:00, the perfect hour on those hot August nights, to stroll with a small group of old and new friends, the 50 meters from the town hall to La Carretilla Restaurant, run by Musa Hachemi, the cordial Algerian owner, whose son is the poet and translator, Munir Hachemi, who has won international prizes for both. The menu at La Carretilla has just enough creativity and exoticism to keep you going back. We went back night after night, sometimes for a couple of drinks and tapas, sometimes for a full supper. I found that wonderful “being together with people” refreshing after the isolation of the Covid years and their aftermath.
That realization affected my relations with people. I hadn’t noticed how much the Covid restrictions had restricted my contact and communication with my friends. I had become a virtual recluse. I had forgotten how delightful friends were—and how necessary. Those suppers by the riverside were essential in my personal renovation. It was there that I realized I was onto something important. In the end, after a month of attending the exhibition, I have made lots of new friends and re-connected with old ones. I sold a couple of paintings and got a couple of commissions, one of them from a lady who loved the rendering of cats in one of my paintings and commissioned me to paint hers. Best of all, the show, in all its aspects, awakened my awareness and my creativity. I feel younger. I’m 84 years old and I feel 35. It feels as if I’m starting afresh as a painter.
It’s almost as if it weren’t work at all. In theory, I’m not working any more. But printmakers and other artists keep popping up. And they are unlike “normal” people. They’re special, more interesting. They have more and different aspirations. The Spanish word is better: “inquietudes.” The young woman who has been here for the past two weeks is a perfect example. She has just graduated from a high-class American university with a dual major in Visual Arts and Cultural Anthropology. But she had virtually no experience in printmaking. We had to start from zero.
That’s not complicated. You just start at the beginning—preparing a plate—and continue through the basics. With luck, in a couple of weeks, the budding printmaker has a rough idea of making a print in various techniques and printing it in various ways. I saw a flutter of pigeons bouncing on a branch of one of our cypress trees the other day, and I stopped to try to decipher what was happening. Finally, I got the picture. It was complicated by the fact that baby pigeons, when the reach the age of leaving the nest, are roughly the same size as their mother. What I was looking at was a mother pigeon trying to get two of her offspring to leave that branch and go face the world.
That’s where my young printmaker was last week. But she was atypical from the beginning. Her plane landed in Málaga on a Sunday morning and she showed up at our house at midday after a long series of flights starting from New Orleans. It turns out that she’s from Louisiana but she was offered a scholarship to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Mike, who is cheeky, said, “That’s an excellent school. What made them go all the way to Louisiana to find you? Are you brilliant, or do you just work really hard?”
“Both,” she replied matter of factly. We weren’t in a hurry that Sunday afternoon, so Rebekah had time to tell us a bit of her story. She was born in Louisiana after her family emigrated there from their pueblo in Northern Honduras. There her grandfather—and by extension her whole family—grew everything and was self sufficient, until a giant American fruit company absorbed their fincas. Instead of living off the land, the children of the family grew up to become exploited workers on pineapple plantations. “What a life your grandfather led,” I noted casually. “Is he still alive?”
“No,” said Rebekah, “He died of a heart attack, a sequel brought on by a hit-and-run incident some years earlier with a Standard Fruit Company bulldozer. It was razing fruit trees in order to open up a road across what had been his former property.”
“What a story,” I said.
“Yes,” replied Rebekah,” I hope to write it someday.”
“It would make a wonderful artist’s book,” I said, entirely spontaneously.
The following morning, Monday, we started work on Rebekah’s artist’s book. What a challenge. The book is little, but the essence is all there. Just over a week later, I asked my long-time helper, María José, to come in and help us print up a few examples of Rebekah’s book, on different papers and in different colors. It won’t be a numbered edition, as each book is different. Each one is a monoprint with hand-written captions. The little, accordion-style book is charming, and moving, and it taught Rebekah a lot about making prints and artist’s books. She’s taking the plates with her and can pull an edition of it whenever she likes.
And I had the privilege of accompanying an exceptional young artist on her first steps in printmaking. The talent scouts from Duke knew what they were doing in Louisiana.
A few months ago I got an email from a woman from Seattle. Farther than that, actually, four hours by ferryboat and car farther, out in the Straits of Juan de Fuca, on the Island of Lopez. Laurie Teichroew had decided she needed what she calls “a reset.” She had lived a few lifetimes already, as a mother of five beautiful children, homeschooled for seven years, and celebrated a boatload of grandchildren; worked as as a bread-maker, and a landscape designer (“I also dig.”) It was time for her to do something she had always wanted to do: art. She had done an over-all-survey-of-printmaking course in college, but it was hardly enough to base a life project on.
So she went where we always go, to Google, and typed in “printmaking course near Granada.” She has just finished a two-week, one-on-one coaching session with me in my studio. She very cleverly added a week to her stay. That gave her time to decompress after her trip from Lopez Island to Granada, and also some time for sightseeing around Granada, even to visit some friends from home who were staying on the Granada coast for a couple of years with their two children. At one point in the visit her paisana said to her, “Sometimes we wonder what would happen if we just stayed…”
Laurie’s first couple of days here, she was disoriented and uneasy. She didn’t like her sketches, nor where they were taking her. Then I saw some doodling she was doing between sketches. “What’s this?” I asked.
“Oh, that, nothing, just an impression of the towns I saw while flying over Spain in semi-darkness on the way here.”
“Why don’t you try developing that a bit?”
She was off and running, converted from a lost puppy into an alpha she-wolf in her chosen terrain. When she had a few sketches she chose the best of them and we turned them into negative solarplate prints, along with a couple of positive intaglio plates and did some interesting ghost prints. She liked the negative relief prints, and soon adopted negative solarplate as her medium of choice. She liked it for its flexibility of treatments, its total non-toxicity and its fast results. “This is a far cry from acid etching,” she affirms, “and the results are beautiful.”
Laurie has a prodigious capacity for learning, and she had a clearly defined objective. She wanted to learn enough printmaking technique to go home, set up her own studio and start out on her new life project. She can do it. She’s got the talent, the intelligence, and the dedication. “I want to get inspired,” she said, “and to have some fun. It will be interesting to follow her progress, I think.
Her first steps were promising. She soon had a dozen or more exhibit quality prints on a selection of beautiful handmade papers and the results were impressive. Just before she left I said to her, “The first thing you have to do when you get home is to show these prints to as many people as possible. Also, if there’s something you need that you can’t afford, propose swapping it for a print or prints.”
“I’ve been a member of an artists’ association for a couple of years, and they have two or three collective show each year, said Laurie. ·But I never participated in any of them. Too shy, I guess.”
“You can forget your shyness right now,” I told her, “these prints are the work of a printmaker.” According to Laurie, a sizeable percentage of the inhabitants of Lopez Island are artists, and she would like to be one of them. I suspect she soon will be.
“There’s a 90-year-old printmaker on the island,” says Laurie, “and I used to pester her to teach me the basics, but we never got around to it.” But I remembered an old promise I had made to myself. I would come back to Granada and study art.”
Asked, “Why did you choose Spain for this trip?” Laurie replied, “I visited Spain once before and was impressed with the southern regions, the part they call, ‘Andalucía,’ for the architecture and the gardens, the food, and what seemed to me the leisurely lifestyle.” She made her second visit to Granada’s Alhambra palace, fortress and gardens on this trip.
What’s her next step? Trying to balance work with an art project. “I’ve still got to work, and I have to set up a studio. How do I go about that? We shall see. Luckily, my kids are all grown up. And the encouragement I’ve received from you and Mike has been a big boost.
We certainly hope so, Laurie. We’ll be following your progress.
Over the past few decades I have hosted artists from around the world, from Norway to Australia and the US to Bangladesh. Something that I have been surprised to learn over the years is how alike they are. That surprised me. In the beginning I assumed that, coming from such disperse places, they would all be radically different. But no, they’re all artists. It makes me wonder if you brought together 100 traffic cops or bank directors or kindergarten teachers from all over, would the groups be more or less homogeneous, like my artists?
My most recent one, Sula al Naqeeb, is from Kuwait. Is she like a traffic cop or a bank director? No, funnily enough, she is an artist through and through. Though, I suspect she could do anything she turned her hand to. She fits nicely in an artist’s shoes, but I doubt she’s a typical Kuwaiti. When she speaks she sounds as if she was raised in mid-Atlantic, between Britain and the US. That´s because she was born in London and studied there and in the US. The combination of the three national traditions has given her a unique world view, which she plays like a violin.
Sula had an art project rambling round her head for a long time, and she had taken a first step, a collection of watercolors. I suggested that she bring them with her and we might start from there. She arrived and I took her straight to the studio to show her some prints done using different techniques. I asked her, “Do you think you might be able to combine any of these techniques with your watercolors and come up with something creative?”
“I think it would be exciting to try,” said Sula. So she spent the next seven days, trying just that. What she achieved thus far is a lot of thoughtful preliminary work and a pretty thorough dominion of the necessary techniques, especially for just a week’s work. Sula fell hard for chine collé, even insisting that I teach her how to prepare the papers. (See results in the photos.) I have seldom had an artist in my studio who grasped printmaking concepts so fast, nor worked so hard as Sula. She’s already planning her return. “I’ll do a lot of preparation before I come back next time,” she says. I’ll be surprised if she doesn’t return home from her next visit with an art exhibit under her arm.
The Preliminary Work
Towards the end of our time together, Sula said that she had done other printmaking courses, but all of them left her dissatisfied because they centered exclusively on technical questions, never touching the subject of the artists’ creativity or their overall projects. She said, “It was so refreshing working with you, Maureen, discussing how my work with you might fit into my creative project, before I ever picked up a pencil or a brush. See you soon.”
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You’ll need some conditions for working, and it’s better to get them right from the beginning: a dedicated workplace, an etching press, heat, light and water, work surfaces and materials. You might be able to start out in a collective studio but, sooner or later, you’ll need a place of your own, even if it’s a garage or a garden shed. Creativity demands concentration, and you need to organize the studio to your own needs and standards of order and cleanliness. If you don’t have much money to invest, invest something else. Invest generosity. A gift of a beautiful print can start a chain reaction. Be generous with your time. Help other artists all you can. Don’t be stingy with your knowledge.
In our early years in Pinos Genil I used to give free painting lessons to kids in the village square and the garden of the old hydro-electric plant. The provincial cultural authority put up the materials, and I even got some mothers painting. That was in the late seventies and early eighties. My pupils were mostly eight-or-ten-year-old village kids. Today I’m old friends with most of the 50 and 60 year olds in town. An old friend in a small town is a rare luxury. A few years ago I was invited to pronounce the “pregón,” the ritual opening speech of the annual fiesta mayor, Pinos Genil’s most important fiesta of the year.
One way which enables you to survive is to swap your work, no money involved. My list is so long: I have exchanged my work for wonderful clothes, dentistry, years of attention from Granada’s most-prestigious gynecologist, a year’s dogfood for a family of Great Danes, a patchwork quilt, artisan pottery, handmade jewelry, original lamps, garden furniture, a magnolia tree, some beautiful handmade paper from the Paperki paper mill in the Spanish Basque country. When my friend, Luisa, closed her decorating business I exchanged two big paintings for a big sofa; some rugs from Taroudant, Morocco at the edge of the Sahara; some lovely lamps, beautiful hand-made curtains and tapestries. Start proposing swaps now. You will be pleasantly surprised. Boths gifts and barter will get your art out and about. You’ll be surprised to find how many people will be enchanted by the idea of doing business without money.
About Selling
My favorite place to sell my work is in my studio. It has a special allure. I’m not sure if it’s the exoticism of the etching press, the busy look or the smell of paints and solvents. It puts them in the mood. I like to sit them down on a chair facing a document chest full of prints in layers of drawers, and say to them, “See if there’s anything you like.” The drawers hold years of prints and proofs, large and small. If they purchase a few prints I make them a gift of another one. I can do that because I’m not paying any commissions. They’ll be back, often bringing along some friends. Studio sales are ideal, and you don’t have to frame anything or get in the car and drive anywhere.
My least-favorite way of selling prints is exhibiting. I’ve had some disappointing experiences. All veteran artists have. Sometimes, when we get together, we share stories. Many years ago, before my print lifetime, through some wonderful French friends, I got an invitation to exhibit in the municipal museum of Agen, in the south of France. I had all the arrangements fixed and we were invited to stay there with our friends, Olga and Touné. I had all the paintings nicely framed and securely packed and had made shipping arrangements with the biggest, most expensive transport agency in Spain, given the possibility of problems at the Spanish-French border. The shipment arrived at French customs a week before the scheduled opening and was turned back for the lack of a single document. I had bought my bus ticket for the following day. Exhibit cancelled.
You Can’t Live Without It
Obviously, there’s no way for an artist to avoid exhibiting, especially when he or she is starting out. But please be careful. I have come to the conclusion that the only thing you can do to avoid problems when you exhibit is to do your homework beforehand. Take the process seriously. Check out everything, Get references. Get it in writing. Even then you may sometimes bump into an unpleasant surprise. But you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve done everything humanly possible.
At the end of the nineties my sales drooped a bit, but that coincided happily with a query from one of my friends, an art teacher in an International Bacalaureate (IB) school in Germany. She wanted to know if I could put together a one-week printmaking course for a dozen or so students from her art classes during Easter Week. That’s what got me into printmaking workshops, and at a propitious time. Happily, the studio that Mike built for me back in the eighties at the bottom of our garden was quite large, 50 square meters, so it admitted small groups. Though one time I had a group of 20 from The American School in Switzerland (TASIS) and managed it by habilitating space in my Gallinero artists’ cabin and calling in my two part-time assistants, María José and Carmen. Martyn, the head of the TASIS art department, and Frank, the photography teacher were also valuable help. The result was an inspiring setting for creative high-school art students who had never done any printmaking. My experiences with groups of European students, which all repeated over a series of years, have been extremely positive, due both to the personal qualities of the students, as well as their exceptional teachers.
Workshops to Afront the Crises
My work with students opened the door to workshops with artists. That turned out to be a life saver in the lean times ahead. I started with mostly Spanish non-printmaker artists. It was rewarding to see them getting into ink. Then, thanks to the websites Mike made for me and kept up, I started getting artists from abroad, first in small groups, then individually. It turns out that the most productive mode of launching or perfecting one’s printmaking is in one-on-one sessions with a master printmaker/teacher. That’s how I learned at the Rodríguez-Acosta Foundation in Granada. The workshop had a lot of members but I was the only one who attended every day. José García Lomas, “Pepe,” the wonderful printmaking maestro there, appreciated that loyalty and took me on as his protege. Everything I know about teaching printmaking, I owe to Pepe Lomas. His method can be summed up briefly. “Respect the taste and talent of the students. Let them follow their own stars.” I can’t remember how many nationalities have passed through my studio over the past four decades.
“Creativity” Covers More Ground Than You Think
Creativity is not just putting paint on canvas or scratching a copper plate. Creativity begets creativity and, once you get in the habit in your studio, it extends to other facets of your life. It becomes a lifestyle, and people who come here notice it. Virtually all the artists who stay in my Gallinero artists’ cabin comment that they sleep better. Serious printmaking is relaxing, but also tiring. The biggest commission I ever had was from a big Paris construction company. They wanted gifts for more than a hundred of their clients and employees. I made several different prints for them in order to keep the edition numbers down, assuring true limited editions. And I ordered some beautiful hand-made-paper, and envelopes in bright pastel colors, from my friends at Paperki. Beyond my most optimistic expectations, those atypical gifts were a big success and the company repeated the commission for two more years.
When Covid 19 shut down the world I went into shock for a while, but eventually decided I had to work my way out of it. So I produced a portfolio of my favorite recipes illustrated with prints. That was an extremely limited edition (limited to the amount of paper I had on hand) and it sold out in a couple of months. Then it occurred to me to convert it into a little book which, with the help of my wonderful printshop neighbor, Ricardo, was a big success. I’m currently working on etched VIP invitations to the inauguration of our village’s new Sierra Nevada Tram Museum. María del Mar, the new director there was one of the 10-year-old students in my village painting classes all those years ago.
Though, As We All Know, the Best Commercial Is Non Commercial
In my last post I promised to dedicate the next one to selling your work. Then there wasn’t a “next one,” because I got swept up in a project to create images for our village’s new Sierra Nevada Tram Museum, located in our old tram station. The Sierra Nevada Tram was an ambitious project promoted by a Granada nobleman–el Duque de San Pedro de Galatino–to ferry clients up to his hotel/gambling saloon up on the mountain. It also provided transport for the people of several villages along the way, one of which was ours, Pinos Genil. The project–20.5 kilometers of tram line between Granada and El Charcón, at 1,500 meters of altitude, included 14 tunnels and 21 bridges, and was presented in August of 1919. Work began a year later and the first stage of the service–Granada-Canales–was inaugurated in 1925. By 1928 the line had reached the Maitena station, from which clients were carried the last stage of the trip up to the hotel by horse and carriage. The tram, which continued operating until 1973, never made a profit. It was finally terminated due to the construction of a giant new dam and reservoir that covered the tracks.
We arrived in Pinos Genil, where we have remained every since, in the fall of 1969 and made use of the delightful little yellow trams both for routine trips down to Granada and summer excursions up to El Charcón where it was cool and they had diverted the River Genil to create a chilly, melted-snow swimming pool. To give you an idea of what the old Spain was like, the couple of rustic restaurants on the tram’s trajectory permitted clients to take their own food and just buy drinks. Today that sounds like science fiction. Oh, I almost forgot, the town hall has very kindly offered me display space to sell my tram-related prints.
Pinos Genil’s Renovated Sierra Nevada Tram Station Museum
My Mixed-Media Images of the Original Trams
Back to Being Commercial
Let’s start with the foundation truth: too few printmakers are able to make a living from their artwork, and it’s not getting any easier. We’ve had the financial crisis of 2009, and for some of us that’s not over yet. Add to that a few more economic wobbles, a few wars, Covid 19, and the disloyal competition of people selling “giclee” reproductions-and calling them “prints,” when they’re just photocopies. What they aren’t is fine-art prints. But they could be sold profitably at a tenth of the price, and they have cut a wide swath through the fine-art-print market, our market. Print departments–and whole art departments–started closing down..
Being realistic, I suspect that printmakers will never again see prosperity like that of the old days. I’m referring to the 70’s-90’s. I fondly remember the first edition of Estampa, the Madrid Fine-Art-Print Fair at the Crystal Palace in Madrid’s Retiro Park in 1993. By the end of the second day of the five-day event I had sold everything I brought with me and had to phone Mike, at home in Granada, and ask him to empty all of the print drawers in my studio and rush all the prints to me in Madrid. Those were great times. There was a leak in the roof right above our stand. Did the management panic? No, they just rolled in a big, potted plant and placed it beneath the drip. It was beautiful, and we continued to sell prints.
That first edition of the fair was boycotted by the art galleries. I think they stayed home because they considered the lowly prints too cheap to make much profit on. But, when they saw the success of that first fair, they quickly awakened to the commercial possibilities there. Over the next few years they took over the running of the event, raised the prices of the stands, imposed mandatory minimum prices for the prints and generally started treating printmakers like merchandise. I wasn’t the only artist to abandon the fair after a few years. Though, it was great in the early days. I confess I miss them.
Selling Fine Art Prints in Troubled Times
So, with all the cards stacked against you, you want to try making your living selling your prints. It’s not impossible, but it’s far from easy. I think the first thing you have to get clear is the fact that you’re not just selling prints. You’re selling your humanity, culture, philosophy and lifestyle. The bottom line is, you’re selling all the best of yourself. If the retail business rests traditionally on three pillars: location, location, location… the fine-art-print business is based on three others: communication, communication, communication.
Luckily, we’re living in the age of Internet, the most powerful communications tool in human history. And, depending upon your level of Internet skills, it’s practically free, because you can do it yourself. Obviously, if you’re a digital native, it will be easier for you. If not, you’ll have to choose between learning to do it yourself or paying someone to do it for you. Happily there is a middle way which, I suspect, is the way many successful artists go. That is, have an expert design your website and prepare templates for your site and your blog. Then, all you have to do is fill in the blanks with fresh content in order to keep everything updated. There is still a bit of a learning curve but you can surf it if you’re constant. Your success or failure, of course, depends upon those three little words: “keep everything updated.”
The success of your online communications depends upon the professionalism of your site, what you communicate and how often. It’s not just about techniques, sizes, prices and shipping costs. It’s much more magical than that. You have to impart your enthusiasm, knowledge, secrets and “ilusión.” This is a Spanish word for which there is no English equivalent that I know of. It’s not about the illusion of a magician. It’s about hopeful enthusiasm and anticipation and the conviction to make things happen. It’s one of the threads that pulls us through life. Maybe I’m getting a bit airy-fairy here, but it’s true that you have to transmit to others your own enthusiasms, aspirations and commitment. That is to say, what you have to communicate is You.
Then There’s Your Work
Your work is the motor of your whole enterprise, and it helps if you have some innate talent. But, talent or not, your trail is the same: study, work, learn to see, do a lot of sketches, re-invent yourself with new ideas and new techniques. And you must work hard to get all the qualified feedback you can, have some studio exhibits, inviting friends, family and art lovers and previous clients who already have some of your work on their walls. Never give up, be positive and create what you see around you, this makes your work authentic and unique.
The most popular way of getting artwork before the public is, obviously, exhibiting. Which brings me to a confession. I don’t like exhibiting. And as soon as I could shake it off, I did. It’s one of the most dubious commercial propositions I can think of. To begin with, it’s a lottery, and most of the risk is placed on the artist. Of course, there are great galleries who work with artists for years and help them consolidate their careers. But they are the exception. My recommendation is to sell as much work as you can from your studio or via Internet or local commercial outlets and choose your exhibitions with great care.
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Part 2/2 coming soon
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A printmaker isn’t just a printmaker, especially if she’s a woman. She’s often a wife, a mother, a cook and gardener, and more. She might even hold down a job. I have been all of those things and still am most of them. I have a pretty clear idea of what you’re going through, and I’ve got a few suggestions for smoothing your way. I’m going to concentrate on the kitchen this time. I love the kitchen. It’s creative work and at its best it can be fun, even therapeutic. But having to come up with two or three meals every day can be time consuming and tiresome.
My first important suggestion: make your family complicit in the kitchen. If your husband cooks, you’re already a step ahead. If not, teach him. The earlier you start, the better. I recommend the second day after the honeymoon or as close as you can get to that. Here in Spain you almost never find men in the kitchen, except to go for icecubes. There is one shining exception to that rule, the men from the Basque Country, who pride themselves on their cooking. They have dining societies, each with its own dining room and big kitchen where they take turns cooking. Sometimes they even invite their wives and girlfriends. We are friends with a mixed couple. She’s from Jerez de la Frontera (the heart of sherry country), where a man in the kitchen is considered a sissy unless he’s a cook. He is a recently-retired engineer from Bilbao in the Basque Country. These days he won’t let the Jerezana into his kitchen. To be invited to a meal at their house is an honor and a delight.
Hubby cooking.
How to Get the Family on Board
Getting the family up to speed in the kitchen isn’t limited to working with (or on) your husband. The kids are even more important, as there are more of them–if you’re lucky. They’re also important because they’re the ones who carry on the tradition. It’s fun and easy to get them involved in the kitchen when they’re little, letting them stir the pancake batter, knead the bread, or turn the left-over dough from the scones into little jam tarts. Make them know from the beginning that to participate in the joy of cooking they are required to take on the tasks of buying the ingredients and cleaning up. Regarding “cleaning up,” if you can afford it, a little help in the house does wonders for your artwork, even it’s just a couple of days a week. How do you justify this luxury? By taking printmaking seriously, doing professional-quality work and selling it! (I’ll talk a bit about this in a future post…)
My husband, Mike, and I have raised three children, two boys and a girl (who are now two men and a woman. The youngest one turns 50 next month.) They’re all good cooks and they all love cooking–and eating. One day, when the youngest one was about 13, and I was up to my neck preparing an exhibit, I said to him, “Tomorrow you’re going to make lunch. Look through this cookery book and find something you would like to make. Go down to the store and buy the ingredients, prepare the meal and call us when it’s ready.” He made a delicious chicken stew and never looked back. The summer he was 18 he worked in an excellent Chaine de Rotisseurs restaurant at a fine hotel in Hamburg, Germany. They wanted to keep him.
This is the place where I have to say “thank you” to all of our kids. I couldn’t have done it without them.
Our Culinary Debt to Spain
Now that I think about it, the cooking at our house owes a lot to the kitchen traditions of Andalusia, as the eight southernmost provinces of Spain are known. I must confess that we eat more olive oil, chickpeas, lentils and spicy blood sausage at our house than the entire population of your average town in Britain or North America. Spain, with its fabulous variety of fish, fruit and vegetables, is a great place for cooking and eating, which is centered around a hearty mid-day meal–el almuerzo. The heart of that lunch is often a big stewpot of meat or fish with lots of vegetables, legumes, herbs and spices. The Spanish call those stews, comida de cuchara, “spoon food” and they are addicted to it. The first thing any Spaniard demands, when he or she returns home from an extended trip abroad, is a plate of lentil stew. “¡Dáme un plato de lentejas!” Believe it or not, none of our kids, raised eating and making real food, will go near a fast-food restaurant.
The Cocina Económica
In the early seventies, when we renovated the stone farmhouse where we still live, Mike insisted that we have an old-fashioned coal/wood-burning kitchen range, the rough equivalent of an Aga range cooker in the UK. The owner at Granada’s only foundry said, “We used to make lots of those but they went out of fashion. Now we make mainly manhole covers. I think we threw out the molds for the cocinas económicas years ago.” Then he added, “Give me a couple of weeks and I’ll try to find enough loose pieces to make you a kitchen stove.” In the end he managed to make two, one for us and another for our builder. That stove, which we only light in winter, is an endless source of wellbeing. It improved the way we heat the kitchen, as well as upgrading our cooking. Mike always wanted an excuse to keep a stockpot on the boil, and now he had it.
Since then that stockpot has been the key to virtually everything we cook. Over the years we have refined the procedure for making the magic broth. For a long time we had a standing order with our butcher who would save us the nice fresh chicken carcasses after he removed the breasts, thighs and drumsticks. We would feed them to our dogs and cats. One day, Mike was chopping them up for the animals and it occurred to him to throw a couple of them into the stockpot. That quickly became the rule. That winter our lemon tree had a bumper crop and he started taking the odd bag of lemons to our friend, Sergio, for use in his bar in the village square. On one of those deliveries Sergio said, “Miguel, we sell a lot of ham (jamón serrano, a local delicacy) and we have a lot of meaty ham bones left over. Could you make use of some of them?” That was when our stockpot took the Great Leap Forward. We bought a large stainless-steel pan and started making enough stock to freeze. So we are never without.
Not only does a constant supply of rich chicken/ham stock improve everything we cook, it also makes the cooking faster and easier. Do you need a heavenly chicken noodle soup? Just put some stock on to boil and throw some pasta in it. Do you need something more substantial? Start with a liter or so of stock, add some pork ribs or any other meat you have on hand, then sauté some onions and garlic. You can add celery, thyme, parsley and bay leaf if you like. Let it boil for a while, then add potatoes and carrots. While they’re cooking, put together a quick green salad with a vinagrette dressing, and lunch is ready.
“Peas Porridge Hot” Cooking
If you increase the amounts a bit you can also resolve the next day’s meal. Just add some chopped spinach, cabbage or kale and, bingo, you’ve got another meal. Mike calls this “peas porridge hot” cooking, and it’s true. You can extend that stew for more days, though beyond three, it’s abusive. If you’re a vegetarian you can do the same thing. Just start with a rich vegetable stock and add legumes: beans, chickpeas, lentils and whatever else strikes your fancy.
The Spanish don’t eat much tinned food (except for tomate frito–fried tomato–a blight on their kitchens). To make chicken soup they start with chicken. To make a cazuela (a soupy seafood dish with noodles) they start with fish, clams, mussels and calamares pulled from the Mediterranean yesterday. Two of their absolutely finest soups–gazpacho and ajo blanco, for me both world-class cuisine–are made in a blender (originally a mortar and pestle) and served ice cold. Google the recipes next summer and make them. It’s easy. I think you will like them a lot.
Please forgive me if my kitchen suggestions sound like Greek to you. I arrived in Spain in the sixties and took to the place, its people and its cuisine like a duck to a goldfish pond. Maybe none of my well-intentioned advice will work for you in your circumstances. But maybe some of it will.
Before I go I want to mention something I have learned after dealing in my studio with printmakers from all over the world for four decades. The world is not made up solely of countries, at least for some of us, the lucky ones. There’s an additional “nationality” and it’s made up of all the printmakers in the world. A print artist from Slovenia is likely to have more in common with a printmaker from Mexico or Pakistan than she might with her next-door neighbor in Ljubljana. I’m not sure what we should call this phenomenon, a “sisterhood/brotherhood?” Whatever you choose to call it, I know it exists. I’ve experienced it over and over. Its a beautiful thing. And you’re a part of it.
Hasta luego,
Maureen
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Artists’ Sketchbooks Would Be of Interest to Their Psychiatrists
It’s logical. A sketchbook expresses the artist’s most intimate thoughts, feelings and concerns in the most candid, honest way. It’s a path directly into her head and heart. For me this second book (not in chronological order) records my fixation on Diva, the lovely chihuahua pup that our wonderful daughter in law, Puri, gave us three years ago. We’ve had a lot of pets over the years, but none of the dogs were as tiny as Diva–before we had mainly great danes and mastiffs–and that lent her a special attraction. That and her cranky, controlling character and loveable manners. Mike wonders how she manages to fit all that mischief and wisdom into a brain the size of an olive.
Here are the sketches:
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It’s an Opportunity to Share Some Village Wine, Chat and See Some of My Work in the Place Where It Was Created
Any boy or girl who turns out to be an artist in life will never forget the first time he or she set foot in the studio of a professional. It’s something that stays with us for the rest of our lives. There is only one experience in an artistic life that inspires more awe: your own studio. Not a corner of the bedroom, nor a garage, nor a porch, but a proper studio with proper light and a door that locks. I was lucky on this count. It was 1966 and I had been living for a short time in Nerja, a village in the province of Málaga, Spain. That little town, in those days, was a dream for a girl from Manchester, UK. It was an authentic Mediterranean fishing village with cobbled streets, roman tiles and a friendly cop with a cap and truncheon. And sunshine beyond my wildest dreams.
There were also foreigners, but not many, and a good proporption of them were painters and writers and one etcher. That arty element gave a special character to the pueblo. It was like an artists’ colony that had sprouted naturally, like mushrooms in the woods, a place where nobody pronounced the phrase, “artists’ colony.” Those artists opened my eyes to a culture and a life that I would never have discovered without their influence.
In the exact center of the village was a big house with an enormous garden dotted with fruit trees. That plot of land was the envy of the village that was already foreseeing a brilliant future in tourism. It was the perfect place to site a luxurious block of flats. But the owner, Conchita Bueno, daughter of a distinguished local family, refused even to consider selling her orchard.
We first met one day when I was painting in the plaza. She paused in her mornintg “paseo” and expressed interest in what I was painting, adding, “So, you like painting on the street, do you?”
“Yes,” I replied, “Besides it’s my only choice. I don’t have a studio.”
“You don’t have a studio,” said Conchita, as if she were alarmed. “Come with me, daughter.” Conchita was like that.
She took me to that big house with fruit trees and led me up to the top floor. It was a spacious attic, one diaphanous wooden-floored space with a view over the orchard.
“Now you’ve got a studio,” said Conchita.
I protested, “You’re very kind, but I’m not sure I can afford such a splendid studio.”
Conchita replied, furrowing her brow as if impatient with me, “You’re not going to pay anything, daughter.”
That’s what Conchita, who didn’t have children, was like.
I Adapt My Studio to Printmaking
I worked for almost three years in that magnificent studio with a little kitchen and its own entrance from the street. I soon began to sell almost everything I painted–lots of local color–and to dream of living from my artwork. That sounded then like a fairy tale. Not quite. I just needed a dose of perseverence and little bit of madness. My next studio was a little stone goat shed on a rocky hillside above Pinos Genil, a village outside Granada. That was followed by a revamped chicken house, and finally a big well-lit studio that my husband Mike built for me. There I only painted until I was selected to study printmaking in the Rodríguez-Acosta Foundation in Granada (1977-80) under the tutelage of José García (Pepe) Lomas, a true master printmaker who left the south of Spain peppered with his disciples. A couple of years later the Foundation closed and I had the opportunity to buy one of their etching presses and all the tables and accessories necessary to convert my space into a fully-fledged printmaking studio. There, over the past 30-some years, I’ve received artists from around the world, to learn printmaking techniques with me.
My Invitation
It’s there that I propose to invite you one weekend during these Christmas holidays (which last 14 days in Spain). There we can sip a glass of village wine together, chat and have a look at some of my work, both paintings and prints. You’ll have the opportunity to discover some new work and some half-forgotten stuff lying in boxes and drawers for decades.
How would you feel about the weekend of December 17, 18 and 19? The address is: Ctra. Güéja Sierra 10, 18191 PINOS GENIL. You can best park in front of the big warehouse with the red and green facade just before arriving at our house. Then it’s a date? I would love that. Hours: mornings 11:00-14:00, afternoons 17:00-20:00. Phone: (34) 605 341 632.
P.S. It’s not easy to get lost, but if you do just ask for “la casa de la pintora.” Once someone got lost and stopped to ask their way. The reply was: “Oh, you’ve got the wrong village. The one you’re looking for is six kilometers down the hill and to the left.”
Photos by Mike Booth
(Follow this link to see a big display of photos. The text is in Spanish but the pictures are in English.)
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Our granddaughter, Elisa, age about ten. She later got a fine-art degree from the University of Granada.
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The Sketchbook Copy Project
For years my husband has been threatening to photograph the content of all my sketchbooks. But first we had to find them. One of the fringe benefits of the new shelves from heaven was that a lot of old sketch books turned up. Mike got inspired. He snatched the first book from the top of the pile and took it into his goat-shed studio. A couple of hours later I pay him a visit and he’s teetering on top of a ladder peering through a camera mounted on a copy stand. It turns out that, in order to photograph the larger books he has to raise the camera pretty high. I protest. He replies, “Don’t worry, it’s not dangerous once you get the hang of it.” This is why women live longer than men.
Mike’s intention is to photograph all the sketchbooks and post them here one by one. The photographs in this post are the result of his first trials.
Meanwhile, I get to talk a bit about the importance of sketching, whether in pencil, charcoal or watercolours. Your sketches are your roadmap, your compass, your storyboard, and you should not be without them. No, photographs won’t do. You need live drawings. I find it so distressing when art classes from excellent European schools come to my studio and I find the students copying images from the screens of their cellphones. This is a history clash. I’m way too old. They’re way too young. And there’s no middle ground.
This necessity to have sketches obliges you to make them. For that you have to be prepared at all times. The greatest images appear at the most unlikely–and inconvenient times. So I urge you to get in the habit of carrying a bag with your current sketchbook and pencils, and watercolours if you’re so inclined. At first it will feel cumbersome and conspicuous. Later it will become part of your person. And you will notice the boost it gives to your work. In this recent rediscovery of my sketchbooks I have more that once been tempted to sit down right then and there and turn a 20-year-old sketch into a brand new print.
I could go on and on, but I’ll leave you with the photographs. I’ll be posting more regularly–if my photographer doesn’t fall off the ladder.
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Mike was on his morning walk the other day–in an elegant subdivision, as it has a mile-long uphill section–and discovered this metal shelving in a rubbish tip. It fit in the back of the car with a centimeter to spare on each side. He noticed, as he was loading it into the car, that it had an electrical cable with a plug on the end. He wondered why shelves need a plug.
When he got it home, down the steps(!) and installed in the studio he plugged it in. It lit up like a Christmas tree. It has a strip of LED lighting on the inside of the plastic strip on the front of each shelf. Of course, it was a display case. Now it’s a lovely, orderly space for the things in my studio which have always been hard to find: sketchbooks, special papers, pencils and paintbrushes… If you’re a printmaker you’ll know what I mean.
So, if your husband goes for morning runs/walks, suggest that he do it in an affluent neighborhood.
An Interview with Pakistani Artist/Educator, Iram Wani
Iram teaches printmaking at the National College of Arts in Rawalpindi, an hour’s drive from her home in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. Last spring the school administrators, conscious of the health hazards and other inconveniences of working with nitric acid, commissioned Iram to search for a professional printmaking studio that used non-toxic techniques, to go there for a month and bring back, first hand, the secrets of not-toxic printmaking. Iram knew where to go.
Eight years ago, in the fall of 2013, she had spent two weeks working with Maureen in her studio in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, outside Granada. Iram, asked how she happened to choose such a far-off place–there are a lot of printmaking workshops between Islamabad and Granada–replied: “I had heard about an English printmaker who did workshops in Spain, so I googled “printmaking courses Spain.” The first half dozen references were to “Maureen Booth, Pomegranate Editions, Granada.” (I later learned that “pomegranate” is “granada” in Spanish, so the city and its province are named after a local fruit.) After following the website for a few months I was impressed by the artists–from all over the world–who worked with Maureen. Also, Maureen spoke English. I had no knowledge of Spanish, but I did have a visa for Spain. That’s how I got here the first time.
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Iram’s work in Maureen’s studio was productive from day one.
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The following is just some of the work Iram produced when she was here.
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This interview took place on October 27, less than a week before Iram was to catch the plane home from the Málaga airport.
Q: What were you hoping to accomplish on this second visit, Iram? A: I hoped to gain an intimate hands-on knowledge of the non-toxic procedures that Maureen uses in her work, both solarplate and liquid metal techniques.
Q: Did you manage during your stay to achieve any part of this very big assignment? A: I think I have achieved far more. There’s so much to learn from Maureen. She’s a true “maestra” as they say in Spanish. I’m already thinking of coming back. Besides getting a grip on not-toxic techniques I wanted to experience the procedures and workflow of a well-run studio. I was impressed by Maureen’s insistence on an impeccably clean and well-ordered workspace. You can’t achieve perfect prints without those two factors. I also hoped to create a portfolio of creative non-toxic prints, something I could present to the administrators of the Institute as an example of what can be achieved without acid. And, if the work were to come out exceptional, I will also be exhibiting it. That will be an excellent way of fulfilling my ultimate goal: to introduce non-toxic printmaking in Pakistan.
Q: Were there things that surprised you on your second visit? A: I think the main thing was just how much there is to learn. Maureen comes up with new secrets every day. I could have learned much more if I had had more time.
Q: You didn’t do any “tourist visits” to the city of Granada, and it’s only eight kilometers down the road. Do you miss that? A: No, I don’t. Maybe next time…
Q: What do you consider your principal achievement in this month-long workshop. A: I guess I could sum it up by saying, “truly living the life of an artist for one intense month.”
Q: Can you take that living-the-life-of-the-artist home with you? A: I can try.
Q: Do you expect your work, and perhaps your life, to change when you get home? A: It’s changed already. I’ve learned from the master how things should be done.
Q: Did Maureen’s Gallinero artist’s cabin with its big workspace, solitude and tranquility, contribute to your experience? A: Yes, I was perfectly relaxed. It’s peaceful, truly an artist’s place. I can’t remember sleeping so deeply. Also, I have bad headaches at home. I don’t get them here at all.
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Maureen’s assistant, María José, came in a couple of days to help Iran and Maureen print up the plates Iram made during her stay. Diva only weighs 2.1 kilos (4.6 pounds) but she is always in the studio, supervising everything.
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You can see more of Iram’s visit to Granada on her Facebook page, with her own photographs, videos and commentary.
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This was an unexpected record turnout here for a book presentation on a weeknight.
It’s the Annual Cultural Week in our Village, the Ideal Time for the Presentation of My New Cookery Book
The release of my little bi-lingual, illustrated cookery book coincided with our pueblo’s annual cultural week, the ideal time to present a new book. If it floats here, who knows, it might float in the rest of the world. Presenting in your own village is a privilege and a challenge. Though you enjoy some pre-existing good will from your friends and neighbors, you don’t want to dilapidate those good vibrations by boring them with pretentiousness or long windedness. You want your story told with agility, grace and brevity.
Ideally you want to win over the folks in the plaza to art and good cooking, and if you can sell a few books, that’s OK, too. For that I asked María José, my assistant in the studio, and her daughter, Silvia to attend a table loaded with books for sale. The number they sold was a delightful surprise. Nobody expected an illustrated cookery book to be a best seller. Attendance looked sparce five minutes before the 9:00 pm starting time, but in those brief five minutes the plaza filled up.
The person I chose to present the book was Ángeles Mora, my dear longtime friend, a wonderful poet and person, who has won two national poetry prizes over the past decade. Ángeles is equally at home in an auditorium full of professors as in a village square, and was ideal for the job, warm and light footed, cultured and homespun. She even read one of her poems that verses on life, love and good eating. I want to translate the last stanza for you: “Apaga la ventana, amor, cierra la luz. Abre la boca.” (“Close the window, my love, put out the light. Open your mouth.”) Gabriel Gómez, our mayor, introduced her and carefully elaborated on her impressive curriculum. When Ángeles finished everybody was refreshed in the head and the heart, and ready for a cold beer. The Pinos Genil village center is the perfect place for that on a summer night.
We, along with a group of 20-some friends, were expecting one of the three bars with terraces on the plaza or the river’s edge to prepare one long table for all of us. But Covid precautions limited each table to just five persons, so we were spread out over five tables. No matter each one created its own fun and everybody stayed late and had a great time. Ours was the exclusively-women’s table where we told hilarious husband stories. Mike’s was the word table with a professor, a librarian, and a journalist. Eduardo, the journalist, came up with the best word of the night: “zorrocotroco.” A zorrocotroco is a hard-headed, inflexible person. He sounds like it, doesn’t he. There are no photos of the post-party. My photographer, with an excellent sense of priorities, dedicated himself to the friends, the beer and the funny words.
I doubt that I’ll have another book to present next summer, but who knows? It’s a lot of fun.
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Maureen’s Kitchen / La Cocina de Maureen, my recent bilingual limited edition of recipes and hand-pulled, hand-colored prints was a response to a year and a half of semi-stagnation, something I suspect many of us have gone through. I was finally able to convince myself–with a little help from my friends–that the way out of the labyrinth was creative work. Get to work and make something beautiful. The edition was limited to 19 portfolios of 16 recipes and prints, because that was all the large sheets of hand-made etching paper I had left in my studio. That sounds ridiculous, but it’s the simple truth.
The invention worked too well. The edition sold out in three weeks. And I still had requests for more–but there weren’t any more. It was the brilliant idea of Ricardo Calvente, our neighbor and the owner of Granada’s finest print shop, la Imprenta del Arco, to publish the content of the portfolio as a book. Using digital technology and incorporating some images from my sketchbooks to add interest, he could print up however many books I required, as the need arose. These books have no fine-art pretensions but I am, nonetheless, delighted with the results.
The smaller format, the spiral binding and glossy paper, encourage the use of the book in the kitchen. On a kitchen counter the open book will lie flat, and if you spill something on it you can wipe it off with a damp cloth. And it can be sold for a fraction of the price of the limited edition portfolio. It’s not the same, of course, but it is an elegant solution to the problem at hand.
Es un descendiente
Maureen’s Kitchen / La Cocina de Maureen, mi reciente carpeta de edición limitada en inglés y español, de recetas y grabados tirados a mano, fue una respuesta a un año y medio de estancamiento/paralización, algo que sospecho que nos ha pasado a más de uno. Al final pude convencerme a mí misma–con la ayuda de mi familia y amigos–que la salida del labirinto pasaba por el trabajo creativo. Pónte a trabajar y haz algo bello. La edición se limitó a 19 portafolios de 16 recetas e imágenes cada uno, porque no me quedaban más hojas grandes de mi papel favorito de grabado. Sé que eso suena ridículo, pero es la pura verdad.
Al final, el invento funcionó demasiado bien. La edición se agotó en tres semanas. Me quedaban solicitudes de más portfolios, pero no quedaban más. Fue la genial idea de Ricardo Calvente, nuestro vecino y dueño de la mejor imprenta de Granada, la Imprenta del Arco, de publicar los contenidos del portfolio en un libro. Usando tecnología digital e incorporando unas imágenes de mis sketchbooks para añadir interés, él podía imprimir cuantos libros que yo necesitara, según surgía la necesidad. No puedo pretender que estos libritos sean “fine art”. Sin embargo, estoy encantada con los resultados.
El formato más pequeño, la encuadernación con espiral, y el papel brilliante, animan a usar el libro en la cocina. En una superficie de cocina el libro abierto se queda plano y si se ensucia, se puede limpiar con un trapo mojado. Y se puede vender por una fracción del precio de la edición limitada. Desde luego, no es lo mismo, pero no deja de ser una solución elegante al problema.
(Click to enlarge, haga clic para ampliar.)
How to Get your Copy of This Charming Little Book
I’m asking 15€ for the book. There are two ways to get it:
If you’re within striking distance of Pinos Genil (eight kilometers from Granada on the old Sierra Nevada road), just drop by the studio and we’ll have a coffee or something and you can take your book home with you.
If you can’t make it in person I’ll be happy to send it to you, and you’ll just have to pay the postage. Drop me an email (maureenluciabooth at gmail.com.) and we’ll discuss the arrangements.
Como hacerse de un ejemplar del libro
Pido 15€ por el librito. Hay dos formas de adquirirlo:
Si puedes acudir a mi estudio en Pinos Genil (a ocho kilómetros de Granada en la carretera vieja de Sierra Nevada) puedes pasar por el estudio, nos tomamos un cafe u otra cosa, y puedes llevar tu libro personalmente.
Si no puedes acudir al estudio, te lo enviaré por correo con mucho gusto. Tendrás que pagar el franqueo. Simplemente, envíame un email (maureenluciabooth arroba gmail.com) y concretaremos el pago y la entrega.
The Presentation
My dear friend, the Spanish poet, Ángeles Mora, will present the book in the Pinos Genil village square on August 4 at 9:00 p.m., during the Pinos Genil Culture Week. You are cordially invited.
La presentación
Mi querida amiga, la poeta de Rute (Cordoba), Ángeles Mora, presentará el libro en la plaza de Pinos Genil el día cuatro de agosto a las 21:00 horas, durante la Semana Cultural de Pinos Genil. Os invito cordialmente.
This project wouldn’t have been possible without the invaluable help of my studio assistant, María José Braojos and her daughter, Silvia Romera Braojos, as well as Ricardo Calvente Chacón, of the Del Arco Print Shop in Granada. And, of course, Mike, my photographer, webmaster, and husband.
I Get By With a Little Help from My Friends
Much as I have tried over the past long year to stay positive, I confess it hasn’t always been easy and at times events have taken a toll on my morale. The pandemic took us all by surprise. Life was different and we suspected it would never be the same again, but first we had to survive the virus. (We have a friend who did die–briefly–and came back and told us about it.) We couldn’t see friends and family, which in Spain form the cornerstone of life on this planet. We couldn’t go out for a drink and tapas. Or drive down to the beach. Our life was reduced to a recurring supermarket-pharmacy-laundromat routine. Though, I shouldn’t complain too much. We were never without our inspiring riverside walking path, nor the loving company of Cuca, Diva, Bundy, Rosey and Susu, whom Mike refers to as “our little people.”
As I mentioned before, it was María José who inspired me to get back to work in a serious way. Let me tell a bit about her. She has become for me more of a daughter than a helper. We met 20 years ago when her husband, Juan Carlos Romera, was planning the production of a 38-minute short film called “Bive,” (“Live” in semi-literate Spanish). He needed a foreign woman artist for a story set in a fishing village in the Mediterranean province of Almería. As soon as he saw my studio he said, “You’re the one… and we’ll shoot the studio scenes in here.” María José was his assistant on Bive. Working on the film with Juan Carlos, María José, and his professional crew from Madrid was all new to me. It was hard work during a hot summer, but intensely interesting, and included some good fun. (You can see the complete film here on YouTube.) But I’m meandering again. What makes working with María José so gratifying is her limitless good humor, her sweet demeanor, her careful work, and her readiness to learn. She’s one of the most positive people I’ve ever known.
It Turned Out to Be a Healing Process
So we decided to start on the prints-and-recipes project. I prepared the originals on acetates and when they were all ready María José stepped in to help me burn the plates and pull the prints. That was our usual procedure. What was new in the process was the hand coloring (“illuminating” is the delightful traditional term) of all the prints, for which her help was invaluable. It was an extremely limited edition of 19 portfolios, but each one had 16 prints and they all had to be colored by hand. It was a demanding, meticulous job that required concentration to the exclusion of everything else. That exclusion included all forms of worry, anxiety, or stress.
A few days after we finished illuminating the prints and had wedded them with the introductory texts and the portfolios (which I made to measure myself), and sold the first few books, it occurred to me that I was feeling quite a bit better. People liked the portfolio. I was full of pride and optimism, and had some money jingling in my pocket. I even had some new projects fall into my lap, a couple of portraits and a big job for our village’s new Sierra Nevada tram museum. It seems I have been renewed by a combination of art, work, and loyal friends. I have always prided myself on being a working artist, and this is just one more proof of its miracles.
I wonder if this simple formula might not work for you, too.
P.S. There are still a few portfolios left. If you need one you can contact me via email: maureenluciabooth (at) gmail.com.
Here you have it, a project that has been rambling round my head for years and finally got started three months ago when my assistant, María José, suggested, “We’re not doing much else, why don’t we start on your recipes-with-prints idea? Suddenly, getting up in the morning in the boring and confusing life under Covid controls began to have meaning. It’s true, happiness is a project.
The recipes are my own personal favorites. Some of them I inherited from my mother and grandmother, some from friends and some of the best local dishes from our pueblo, Pinos Genil. I have included some vegetarian dishes and some are my own creative experiments. I hope you will find them interesting. This has been an inspiring learning experience for me and I’m happy to see the result.
Preparing an edition is, beyond the image making, a lot of work. The Spanish would say it’s a combination of “arte y artesanía.” Once you’ve refined your sketches and burned them onto plates, you’ve got all that printing to do by hand. Though this edition is a small one, with only 19 portfolios, each one has 16 prints. Add to that the hand coloring of all of them. Then there was the text. As it is impractical to handwrite the recipes in English and Spanish on plates, the answer was a print shop and all the complication that entails. For both of these problems I had extraordinary luck close at hand. They are named María José, my near-daughter whom you have already met, and our neighbor, Ricardo, who owns one of Granada’s most exquisite print shops, laImprenta del Arco. I’m forever thankful for his patience with all my changes and his excellent criteria concerning my doubts. And I don’t want to forget María José’s lovely daughter, Silvia Romera Braojos, who did the translation into Spanish and the formatting of the text.
Young Old Friends
So each DIN-A4-sized recipe has Ricardo’s offset text on one side and my hand-pulled original print on the other. One of the advantages of living in the same place for 50 years is that you know whom you can rely on. And our pueblo, Pinos Genil, is a great place to live. I have an added advantage here. In the late 1970s I used to give painting lessons in the town square to all the children who were interested, and today I am privileged to have all of those children as 40-and-50-year-old friends.
I haven’t had much feedback yet, except for our old friend, the doctor/painter, Rafael Sánchez, who dropped by last night for one of his amusing visits. He saw the portfolio, said, “This is art on the outside and art on the inside,” and took one home with him. That was encouraging, Rafa, thank you.
As for how to enjoy/display/use these prints is up to the owner. You would have to have a pretty big kitchen to frame and hang 16 prints. You could leave the portfolio on a coffee table (along with a pair of white cotton gloves). Or enjoy figuring out your own creative solution. If you think you might like to have one of the 15 remaining portfolios (discounting one each for María José, Ricardo and me) you can email me at maureenluciabooth(at)gmail.com.
It’s been an eventful month and we’re approaching the end of the Maureen’s Kitchen project, hand coloring the prints. It has been a lovely team experience. Ricardo, our neighbor from down the hill, has a print shop in Granada. He does wonderful work, including a recent exquisite book on our pueblo. I was concerned about printing the recipes (in English and Spanish) on textured etching paper but Ricardo said, “no problem” and they came out perfect. That text was on the left side of each DIN-A4 sheet (210 × 297 millimeters or 8.27 × 11.69 inches). On the right side of each paper my assistant, María José, and I hand printed the plates on the small etching press in my studio (which was given to me years ago by my dear friend, Mararo, and now use more than the big one). The result looks like a marriage made in heaven. (See Mike’s photos, below.) It only remains to make the portfolios and assemble them and decide on a cover design. I’ll let you know.
Here’s Some of the Finished Color Proofs
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You Like Luxury? Try a Family of Little Birds Outside Your Kitchen Window
One of the most delightful things we discovered over the last month was a pair of tiny birds building a nest near the top of a small cypress tree outside our kitchen window. As the Gallinero, where we spend the winter (at 40 meters from our house) is on a steep hillside and the cypress grows on the downside, when we look out the kitchen window we’re looking at the top of the tree, where the birds are working just six or seven meters from the window. Not that we can see them building the nest, as that happens inside the dense branches of the tree. We just see them coming and going. They know what they’re doing.
We still don’t know for sure what class of birds they are. As close as we can get they look like the family of the European Black Caps or American Chicadees, most likely the 11 cm. Willow Warbler but maybe the Chiffchaff (called that because of their call: “chiff-chaff.”) I’ll post some pictures here of what we found on the Web and what their nest probably looks like inside that cypress.
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How My Garden Grows
My miniature garden started out early this spring with eight or ten boxes. Suddenly it’s up past twenty. And Mike found a nest of lovely plastic boxes sitting outside a local supermarket last night, waiting for the bin man. So now my garden will soon be bigger. This is what the Spanish call “vicio,” and it takes a lot of different forms. It’s not that we don’t eat something from my garden almost every day. Whether it’s the lovely sweet peas, a few spinach leaves in a salad, some Swiss chard in a stew, or the latest surprise: big, bright red strawberries. What a thrill.
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Our Grandson Claudio, Looking Like a Footballer at 14
I Hope This Spring is Being Kind to You
I have a suggestion for at least making it feel kinder. Instead of scheduling youself one long walk daily, try two short ones. It was something Dr. Salvatierra (“Save the Earth”), my arthritis specialist, suggested and it works, both physiologically and psychologically, though I’m not sure why. He recommends starting with 20 minutes each walk. See if it doesn’t work for you.
See you soon. Now I’ve got to go down and illuminate a few prints.
If this picture looks contrived it’s because it is. That girl in the corner is a correspondent for Andalusian television who came to do an interview, and Mike thought it would be nice to put some of my sculptures in the foreground. The pomegranate tree outside my studio door was bearing beautiful ripe, colorful fruit, so why not include that, too? The Spanish would call a mess like this a menjunje or a batiburrillo. The Spanish have some wonderful words. P.S. “Granada” is Spanish for “pomegranate,” in case you were wondering.
Another Sort of Printing, Which Was Also Important(!)
This one-hour video about the birth of Gutenberg’s printing press is only marginally relevant, but we liked it so much, also for Stephen Fry, that I’m sharing it with you here. Just thinking about the effect that Gutenberg’s press and moveable type had on every aspect of life in the entire world makes one dizzy.
Spring Is in the Air
First come the almond blossoms, then the baby ducks in the river. I no longer have to cover my box plants at night, we use much less firewood. The light coming through the glass-pane doors in my studio is gayer and I essentially don’t have to turn the lights on. The animals (we call them the little people) are more active, almost as if they were coming out of hibernation. They do love to hibernate.
I had the second Covid Injection a few weeks ago, so I’m supposedly immune, but until Mike has his second shot in a couple of weeks, we won’t be out of the woods. We’re looking forward to making a big paella and having some friends over. Like the old days. Remember them?
The animals seem to have played a larger role in our lives over the past year. I suppose it’s because we’re living in closer quarters, with a normal-size bed in our Gallinero cabin. Our animals are well loved. You can tell just how well by how much we let them get away with. Ours–two dogs and three cats–get away with murder. Bundy, our young tom cat takes diabolical delight in pawing things off tables and workbenches. It’s usually not too serious, though. They eventurally turn up under a cupboard or a sofa within a couple of months. Cuca, our 14-year-old shi-tsu/grifon cross, was given to us by a friend when she was 10 months old because she resented him going to work. She is an excellent communicator. To inform him of her discontent she would jump up on his bed and pee on his pillow. He was so happy when we told him we’d take her off his hands.
Our animal history hasn’t always been so joyous. Once we gave a kitten to friends. We were happy to do it because they had two lovely children under the age of eight and we thought it would be good for them. The first thing the family did was to lock the kitten in the garage with sufficient kibble and water and took off for a two-week holiday. When they got back and saw how frantic he was they returned him to us. He was very happy to be home. And that wasn’t the only charming pussycat anecdote. Another friend asked for a cat to keep down the rats in his henhouse. So we gave him a half-grown kitten. A month or so later he wanted another one. So we gave him another one. When he came back for a third I said to him, “What are you doing with all those cats?· “Nothing,” he said nonchalantly, “the foxes eat them.” I won’t mention the names of the people involved. The Spanish say, “Se dice el pecado, no el pecador.” “You name the sin, not the sinner.”
Some of Our Animals Over the Years
The little boy with the big dogs is now a 48-year-old geology professor.
More Recent Photos, Fewer Animals
Remember the Cookery Portfolio?
I’ve decided to call it, Maureen’s Kitchen (in Spanish, La Cocina de Maureen). I’ve been working on the recipes and the plates for the prints. I think I’ve got them all ready, but I want to pull some proofs before I made the final decision. The proofs are so important. They can be printed in so many different ways and the decisions on those proofs can make or break a project. I’ll show you some here when I get something nice.
It Sounds Silly But…
Now that it no longer freezes at night my garden in boxes is growing by leaps and bounds. I’ve added a few more boxes and am looking for more space. Mike suggested under the roof overhang of the Gallinero, but I think it would get too much direct sun in the summertime. We have a strategy for the month of August. That’s our month for late nights (una delicia), early mornings, long siestas (more delight) and long drinks. The hard part is going to bed late and getting up early. But you soon get used to it. The long siesta helps.
The beauty of the box garden is that you can pick them up and put them in the shade when necessary. When I started out I was looking forward to just the fun of having little vegetable plants in boxes, like potted flowers. But it turns out that you can actually eat the crops. There are always some leaves you can snip off to brighten up a salad or a stew, and you can pretend that the tops of the red onions are chives. We’ve just started eating the peas raw. Sooo sweet. If you decide give a box garden a try I have a warning for you: You will get hooked. How do I know? At the place where I go to buy plants I coincide with other people who have box gardens and we swap stories enthusiastically. They’re hooked just like me.
An Homage to Spanish Medicine
I’ve just arrived home from my twice-a-year appointment with my reumatólogo–that’s an arthritis doctor. I’ve been visiting him for 12 or 15 years, so we’re old friends. He turned my life around from the first visit. Thanks to him I can live a virtually painless life doing what normal people do–except pole vaulting. Since we don’t pay doctors or hospitals in Spain, I like to show my appreciation with a little gift, so I take along an etching to my appointments. When we finished the consulta this morning and I was about to leave, he said, “You’re always giving me lovely gifts, Maureen. I’ve got something for you I think you and your husband might like,” and he goes to a cupboard and brings out a box that says, “Consejo Regulador de la Ribera del Duero,” Spain’s most prestigious wine region. Between one thing and another, I love going to the doctor.
Sometimes I go weeks or even months without sketching, and I’m not sure why. Considering it seriously I think it comes down to three factors: distractions, just plain sloth and the Great Pandemic Excuse. I don’t have to tell you how many ways there are these days to be distracted. We are living in the Age of Distraction. That’s what came between the Iron Age and the Age of Extinction. Formerly, to be distracted you had to have a shower, change your clothes, get in the car an,d go out. You saw people and places, movies and shows, the beach, the library, the golf course and the tennis court, the gym, the birds and all the other creatures that creep and run, including your grandchildren. Nowadays there’s very little of that.
Big Communications has seen to it that, for a price, they can provide you with versions of almost all those things you used to do in person, without setting foot outside your house, And it’s a good thing they did. Where would we be during the Covid 19 lockdowns if they weren’t providing us with YouTube and Netflix and all the rest? Nevertheless, they’re still distractions and have to be managed as such. As for sloth, that’s easy. It comes automatically. I discovered a long time ago that the less you do, the less you can do. How do you break that chain? You do something, of course. Then, poco a poco, you do a little more. The handiest, easiest, healthiest and most rewarding thing to start with is walking. Mike used to be so annoying on the subject. He never let up. Finally I started walking with him. Then I started feeling better, with more spring in my step and in everything else. Now I badger him to go walking.
Is Your Essence in Your Sketchbooks?
Having been around art and artists for many years I have seen a lot of sketchbooks. I often find the work you see in them is better than–or at least different from–the stuff they frame and hang on the wall. Fresher, more daring, more fun, more portable… Mike loves my sketchbooks. He thinks I should publish a book of facsimile copies of the best images in them. That sounds like too much work, but I would consider posting some of them here. I wanted to know more about what painters and printmakers do with their sketchpads, so I googled “publishers of artists’ sketchbooks,” and there are a few of them. So, if the spirit moves you…
The site I found most fascinating belongs to a guy called Danny Gregory. He has a long and distinguished history as an advertising art director but some time ago he left advertising in order to dedicate himself to his own art and an online art school site. I found him very engaging. You might, too. Here’s a link to his self publishing site: from there you can find more material that you might find useful. Before I forget, here are some images Mike captured off my latest sketchbook:
How’s the Virus Treating You?
I hope you’re being careful and looking after yourself. The stakes are so high. We had a nice note today from Gina Miller, Ross Miller‘s wife. They live near Melbourne, Australia. She paints and he sculpts. Gina says they’re just coming out of a five-day lockdown but now everything’s OK as cases and deaths are back down to zero. What envy. How is it that some countries have the virus under control or virtually exterminated, and others have become giant mortuaries? The virus, itself, doesn’t play fair, either. It keeps moving the goalposts. Even so, there’s still room for optimism. I had the first Covid virus vaccine shot last Friday and had no unpleasant after effects. We shall see.
Aside from that, it’s business as usual here. Our big galas are every other Monday when we do a supermarket, laundromat, car wash commando raid. (Mike insists on the latter, says it maintains his mental stability. Boys!) María José, my helper, and her lovely daughter, Sylvia, were here today. We worked on the text for my upcoming portfolio of favorite recipes, illustrated with prints. (Before it was a portfolio it was going to be a book, but that started to look complicated. The portfolio has the advantage that you can add more recipes whenever you like.) We all had our best masks on, of course. We looked like bank robbers in a western movie. Mike made lunch. It smelled so good when I walked in the door. In the end it turned out to be a big tin of fabada asturiana, an Asturian bean stew. And there was a lovely green salad with it.
So, may your beans always smell great and your salad always be green. Take much care and I’ll see you next time. I’m looking forward to the time when I can say, “We had a great time last night with a lot of laughs with friends at our favorite fried-fish tapas bar! Come and join us.”
The pandemic has been messing with our minds and bodies for almost a year now and, instead of getting better little by little it’s getting worse all of a sudden. What are we supposed to do? I suggest that our first priority be to stay alive, by taking advantage of all the pertinent survival measures. You know what they are. Just apply them rigorously to yourself and your loved ones. Here in Spain we’re entering into the “third phase,” which promises to be the most virulent.
What lauched the virus’s latest improvement at the end of last year was the sentimentalism of the Navidad familiar, the family Christmas. How many grandparents were sacrificed to those joyous holidays. That period of Christmas cheer and deadly danger are even more dangerous here, as the Spanish celebrate 14 days of Christmas, from December 24, when they have their Christmas dinner, till January 6, the Epifany, when the los Reyes Magos, Melchor, Gaspar and Baltazar (The Three Wise Men) bring the children’s gifts. All of which doesn’t make much sense since the kids don’t get their presents until the day before they go gack to school. Perhaps this explains the rising popularity of Papá Noel (Santa Klaus, Father Christmas) here. He delivers more than two weeks in advance.
What’s Next Then?
If you’re reading this you have probably gotten through the joyous season alive. What next? As I see it, what’s next depends largely on you. In the case of my husband, Mike and me it revolves around three things: a project (or more than one), a sense of humor and an appreciation of simple pleasures. And I almost forgot the fourth factor: a loving pet, even if it’s your husband. I’m lucky enough to have both, and they’re both capable of making me laugh and cry.
We each have our own projects. He writes and makes photographs, and also cuts firewood. I’m painting a couple of portraits and working on my favorite-recipes portfolio of prints. We share the housework. Mike does the ironing, says it’s like meditation. I’m so glad he feels that way. I’m still cultivatinge flowers and vegetables in boxes. I’ve always had lots of flowers in the garden and loved them, but these little pansies and lettuces, the tomatoes and kale plants, and the tiny little pea plants, are something different. For one thing they’re mostly up on tables and walls, so they’re closer and you don’t have to bend down to tend them–and appreciate them close up. In all it’s a lot of fun. If you don’t have a garden, you can still do it on your porch or window ledges. Just wait till you cut the first frilly leaves of kale to adorn the top of a bean stew. Then you’ll understand.
Necessary Diversions
Before I forget, I want to mention the joy of Internet. It’s getting a lot of bad press lately because of sinister interests taking unfair advantage of its wonders. Even so, I consider it a blessing for mankind, especially during stressful times. It enables us to maintain contact–immediate personal contact–with family and friends regardless of distance. That is so enriching. And, as you probably have some time on your hands, it permits you to renew your contacts with friends from the old days, or even find new friends whom you find charming on the Web. Not to mention Google and Wikipedia, which make everything instantly look-upable. Think about it for a minute. How did we ever live without these two miraculous research resources? They make us so much smarter. And let’s not forget You Tube and its endless music offerings, and its wonderful documentaries.
As I mentioned in a previous post, we also get a lot of fun from cooking. As we go shopping much less frequently we often find ourselves short of ingredients, so we have to improvise, You can substitute apples or kiwis for tomatoes in a salad just fine.That shortage of ingredients also inspires creative cooking. The results aren’t always fully successful but usually they are. We made a delightful discovery lately. The little woodstove in our kitchen has a shallow compartment at the top, under the lid, where we found we can roast squash, potatoes, sweet potatoes and, mmm, apples. The other day we roasted half a chicken with sage and onion stuffing. That wasn’t bad, either. Does all of this good cooking put on weight? Hmm, yes.
The Essential Medications–Walking, Laughing and Helping
We do get a bit of cabin fever. That’s where a sense of humor is essential. If you can still laugh you’re probably going to be OK. We also try to get in an hour’s walk every day. That’s good for everything that might be wrong with you. We’re lucky to have a lovely walking path along the river (Río Genil) that runs below our house, through the village and on to Granada.
Another thing that will brighten your days is helping people out. Everybody has needs these days and there’s always something you can contribute, even if it’s only a sympathetic ear. We’ve got a big lemon tree we planted outside the kitchen window many years ago and now it bears so many lemons during six months a year that there is no way we can use them all, even though I make tons of our grandchildren’s favorite pancake and toast topping: lemon cheese, or do you call it “lemon curd?” Mike picks the extra lemons from time to time, puts them in bags and drops them off at our neighbors’ doors. He also leaves them at the bars and restaurants in our village.
We have a lot of bars for the size of our little town (pop. 1,250) because it’s a popular place during most of the year for people from the city which is just 8 km. (5 miles) down the road. They come out for the cool on summer evenings and the hearty food in winter. This local tourism started a few decades ago when a forward-thinking (or lucky) mayor dropped some ducks in the river where it passes through the town square. Soon the granadinos started bringing their children out to feed them dry bread (the ducks, not the kids.) Once the families got here they discovered a local bar whose owner, Marina, served up a powerful plate of arroz caldoso, the local-style juicy paella. Now we have 8 or 10 bars and restaurants and they all serve something. Today our river is full of big, beautiful white geese.
It’s a Winter Holiday
Did I mention that in wintertime, when I seldom have artists coming, we move into my Gallinero artists’ cabin at the end of our garden? It’s a lot cozier than our old stone house and easier to heat. It’s also quieter and has better views from its little terrace. In a way staying here is like being on holiday. We like it a lot except for the normal-size bed which is a bit too small for Cuca, Diva and Bundy to fit in with us comfortably. It’s a constant battle for space. Never mind, whatever inconvenience they cause, they more they make up for it in laughs, especially the chihuahua, Diva, the 4.5-pound (2.1-kilo) tyrant of the house. All in all, no complaints.
So take the best possible care of yourselves, don’t forget to laugh and, if you like, send me the stories of your own projects and I’ll post them here. And don’t forget that you and I have something in common. We all belong to the ideal world of painters and printmakers, which is a unique space of wonderful people, just for us.
Switzerland’s Prestigious TASIS School Exhibits Prints from Their Work in My Studio
Art classes from The American School in Switzerland (TASIS) have been coming to my printmaking studio to learn printmaking with me since 2015 and, over time, have accumulated a body of work. Their art teachers, Martyn Dukes and Frank Long, always anxious to promote their young artists, many of whom go on to university art programs, help them put together a collective show of their work here over the past five years. What follows is a brief article they published recently on the TASIS website.
Print Exhibition featuring student artworks from TASIS Visual Arts Academic Travel Granada Print Workshop, 2015 – 2020
Now on view in the Ferit Şahenk Art Center’s Horst Dürrschmitt Gallery on the TASIS campus in Montagnola, a small village overlooking Lugano, is an exhibition of student prints from solar plate etchings and gravures made in the print studio of master printer Maureen Booth in Pinos Genil, Spain, near the city of Granada. The show celebrates the diversity of student work and the wonderful opportunity that a week-long, immersive art-making workshop provided to TASIS students in the Advanced, AP, and IB Visual Arts courses.
In addition to individual student prints, the exhibition features three collaborative Artists’ books made in February, 2020 and short videos on the gallery screen that show the printmaking process in the studio.
Students from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020, and 2021 are represented in the exhibition which features a wide variety of subjects and styles, all encapsulated in the Solar Plate technique. Intaglio etchings in various colors of ink and featuring Chiné-colle applique are seen alongside photogravure and design gravure examples.
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The exhibition will remain on view until January, 2021. View images of exhibit fullsize. (Scroll down to second feature. For another TASIS article with more photos, scroll down more.)
The limitations imposed by the coronavirus crisis have not been too hard on us. We live in the country and enjoy the garden, the sunshine and fresh air, the pets, the night sky, the river walk… What we are lacking is human contact. We hardly see our friends and family and when we do we can’t give them a hug and a kiss, a Spanish custom that we have taken to whole heartedly. The other custom that is one of life’s pillars in this part of Spain–Andalusia, in the south–is the tapas bar, our three-times-weekly multi-purpose feelgood experience.
It’s a magical mix of irresistable food in enticing quantities, much of it eaten with toothpick skewers. In the great tapas bars returning clients are treated like family. Our favorite one, in a nearby village and frequented by townspeople of all stripes, from campesinos to local gentry, whole families including babes in arms and grandparents, horse traders and sleek señoritos with beautiful women. When we arrive I’m welcomed with a kiss from Monica, the lovely Gypsy waitress, usually followed by a conspiratorial tip for insiders: “Today we have torta de quisquillas, crunchy little patties filled with tiny whole shrimp…” Or little plates of paella, or exquisitely fried fish, all wiggly fresh from the wholesale fish market in the port of Motril, less than an hour’s drive down to the Mediterranean coast.
A few little plates of those mini-delicacies washed down with a chilled dry white wine, or icy draught beer make the world an infinitely better place. My husband Mike likes to sit at the bar, where we have the opportunity to meet new people and learn new tricks from great bartenders, like leaving the last finger of wine in the bottom of the bottle so as not to tip the lees into your drink.
What triggers these festive, culinary, fraternal outings? Any pretext works: “I don’t feel like cooking.” “Neither do I.” “We’re out of olive oil.” “It’s Friday!” “I’m bored.” “Me, too.” “I’ve worked enough today.” “Me, too.” We have a big lemon tree that fruits during six months of the year, so we often take a basket of tree-ripened lemons as a gift for the house. That cements relationships, too.
Beans with Everything
So, suddenly deprived of all of this, what do you do? You have to be creative. As I think I’ve already told you in a previous post, I started making sourdough bread and pancakes. It took me about a month to perfect the process, and during the times my dough was rising I had time to dabble in cooking experiments. Our freezer is always full of ingredients for siege cooking–ground beef, pork loins and ribs, vegetables of all sorts, chickens for stews and stocks, frozen cod and prawns and life-saving leftovers, which just need reheating.
The main results of this fiddling with food preparation were two tendencies:
Quick, varied, tasty, tapas-like meals. The secret of these is homemade chicken stock, which enriches everything. We make a big vat of it about once a month and freeze it.
And hearty pots of stew. Mike calls them “peas porridge hot” as they tend to get reincarnated from day to day. The Spanish call this comida de cuchara, “spoon food,” and it has become our regular fare, frequently with no meat at all (we hardly miss it), but always with at least a couple of varieties of beans. Here’s how that happened: Mike was making his chili con carne one day and discovered we were out of pinto beans. So he used a mixture of red and butter beans. That was great and now he makes his chili with all three. It gains in taste and texture and is even better looking.
The Shock of Confinement
Once I was over the initial shock of the confinamiento it occurred to me that I had the time to work on projects that I had been putting off for years, such as the artist’s book of favorite recipes. María José, my assistant in the studio, reminds me of it from time to time. So a couple of weeks ago I finally got started. It’s going to be bi-lingual English and Spanish, illustrated with a limited edition of solar-plate prints, and include not just my own recipes but some others well loved by our kids and grandkids, including some traditional Spanish and English dishes and some from friends.
We’ve always made jams, chutneys and conserves but now, with more time, we make more. We have a few fruit trees and berry bushes in our garden so we’re not short of fruit.
Quince
One of our favorite bases for both sweet and savory preserves is quince, which looks like a cross between an apple and a pear, and has so much character that you can’t eat it raw. I never saw it in England and Mike says he never knew it in America, but it thrives here mainly for making the traditional quince jelly (carne de membrillo). We cook it sliced in sugar syrup to make a compota and chop it fine, add sugar–and sometimes fruit– for jam. To make chutney you just use less sugar and add chopped onions, vinegar and lots of spices. You might try this at home if you can find any quince.
My mini herb garden began with two tomato plants in a pot last summer, then expanded to more–herbs and vegetables planted in pots, discarded wooden boxes and old drawers–gives me unending satisfation. Right now, as I sit by the fire writing this, I hear autumn’s first rolling thunder and feel the joy of anticipating the rain on my little garden. There’s nothing like real rain, especially in our arid climate. We ate the tomatoes at the end of summer, a total of eight. In early fall I planted more herbs–coriander, basil and two varieties of thyme–and some winter plants–lettuce, radishes and two colors of kale. Now I’m preparing some boxes for early spring planting. The joy of a miniature garden is more concentrated, like the difference between a mastiff and a chihuahua, though we love them both.
I’m still reading a lot and enjoying it immensely. I started with Tolstoy, and War and Peace led me directly to books on military history–Napoleon Bonaparte and Julius Caesar–and also the other great Russian writers: Turgenev, Gogol, Pushkin, Chekhov… I haven’t gotten to Dostoyevski yet but I’m looking forward to him. Never before have I felt so strongly that reading is uplifting. And, inevitably, I’ve come to sorely regret the crass and unfair way Russians have been marginalized by Western society.
The Joy of Going to the Hospital
I went to Granada’s new hospital the other day for a minor operation and was reminded of the excellence and actual loveability of the Spanish health service, which starts just down the hill with our village doctor and nurse. It goes far beyond mere professionalism, though there’s no shortage of that. Everybody’s medical history resides on a network and can be accessed by any hospital, local clinic or pharmacy in Spain. But what makes the big difference from other efficient systems is the levels of kindness, patience and thoughtfulness you experience throughout. I think this has to do with the Spanish character. The surgery that attended me was 100% feminine. In the past couple of decades Spanish medicine has been richly endowed with brilliant women, perhaps, because they’re generally better students. So, I walked in and walked out–new–after just two hours, which included a general anesthetic. The only cost involved was paying the parking lot, which Mike thought was exorbitant at four euros.
While we’re on the subject of economy I want to mention barter. With so little cash around lately, we’re going back to barter whenever we can. The other day, Victor, the lad who supplies us with firewood, stopped by and asked if I could paint a portrait of his four-year-old daughter. I said sure, happy to. He asked how much I would charge him. “As you’ve got firewood and we need some, let’s do a swap.” He was delighted and brought us two splendid loads of almond wood nicely cut to fit in our stoves. I’ve done a lot of barter over the years–for clothes, furniture and rugs, dentistry, home improvements… I love the homespun elegance of it. No money changes hands.
Other Places We No Longer Go, Things We No Longer Do
For years we’ve gone to our spa pool at seven a.m. three times a week. The warm water and the high-pressure massage jets were so revivifying we called it “the fountain of youth.” The spa happened to be in La Zubia, a nearby village with a wonderful old-fashioned coffee shop, la Cafetería Mavi, By “old-fashioned” I mean they rise at 4:00 a.m. to bake the day’s bread. rolls and buns on site, and bring them out still warm at 8:00. We would go there for breakfast on our pool days. Mike says their napolitana de chocolate is the closest he’s ever come to a religious experience. We thought life was impossible without this Monday-Wednesday-Friday morning ritual. As you have already guessed, we don’t go there any more, not to the coffee shop and not to the spa.
Instead we do morning walks along the river path that runs beneath our house. It was widened and de-brushed last year, and extends nine kilometers, all the way to Granada. It’s not quite the spa and the Mavi on a chilly morning, but it’s still great and we take our little Diva, with us.
Nor do we drive down to the beach on summer mornings. We used to do a nice walk with two or three swims included, then return to the beach restaurant for a breakfast of coffee and toast with olive-oil, fresh tomato and mountain ham. We would be back home before noon. We felt so clever leaving home at 8:30 a.m. with no traffic and returning around 11:00–also no traffic.
We don’t go shopping except for groceries. Or to restaurants. And we no longer invite friends and family for paellas or barbecues. That is what hurts most. As for getting on a train or an airplane, or even a bus, forget about it.
Bottom line: Is our life worse? In some ways yes. We miss our family and friends sorely. In other ways it may actually be better, as I’ve tried to explain. What it is, beyond all else, is different. Can we cope with these differences? I read somewhere that learning to live with change keeps you young. The trickiest part is not knowing the duration of the emergency. We may be in for an even-longer haul. I shall do my best and keep you informed. I hope that you too are managing to cope, and that we will soon see the day when we can get together again.
Note: This is a story I wrote two years ago, durante this exhibition, and forgot to post. I just discovered it today in the files and will post it now–better late than never.
Maureen and Inma Exhibit in Town Hall During the “Semana Cultural”
The friendship between Maureen and Inma started more than 30 years ago when Maureen was giving outdoor painting lessons to the children of the village. Inma was one of the most promising young artists. She was 14 years old. Fast forward thirty-some years. Inma invites Maureen to exhibit with her in the Pinos Genil town hall during the annual summer “Semana Cultural.” What Maureen discovered during the show was that, in the intervening years, Inma had become an artist and the best-loved person in the village. Maureen said afterwards, “After exhibiting with her I realized it was the most pleasurable show I ever participated in.”
For the occasion the mayor renovated the exhibit hall with fresh paint and swanky new lighting, and commissioned a local designer to produce a nice tryptic. He even laid on the refreshments and sent the village truck round to pick up the framed work, all of which made it a pleasure to show “at home” in Pinos Genil, a village of 1,200 people. The opening-night crowd was a mix of locals and people from Granada and the UK. The Granada artists who came were impressed by the exhibit space and the professional air. They’re now lining up for shows in Pinos Genil, the new cultural Mecca of greater Granada.
The show is on through the month of August. Here are the pictures of the opening night:
Seven months with three cats, two dogs and a husband, and no place to go, gives you some time to think. That’s one of the luxuries of the coronavirus threat. The first thing that occurs to you is how superfluous a large part of your life has been. You begin to think about what’s important, what keeps you afloat, what’s worthy of your time, and what will keep your spirits up during this atypical experience.
The first thing I did was to sit down. I found myself stuck between confused and despondent. I just wanted to stay sitting down. I picked up a book and started reading. I started with Tolstoy. After 20 pages of War and Peace I couldn’t believe I hadn’t discovered him sooner. A couple of hundred pages later I realized that he had not only introduced me to Napoleon, he had lifted me out of the doldrums. I was back. So much to do. So many more books to read, and so much more.
My first new project was sourdough bread. It took me about a month of experimenting to get it under control. But it was never tiresome. It was full of suspense, fascination and the joy of seeing the bubbles come to the top of the brew. Then the bread. After a few inevitable failures I started making proper bread. Then superior bread. And there was a delightful side benefit: sourdough pancakes. Every morning. With different homemade jams. Can life get any richer?
I soon found that I had more time for the house and–gasp–my studio, which is on the hillside just below our house. I made some watercolor sketches around the garden–which always reminds me of Monet, doing some of his most wonderful paintings of the pond in his garden. I began to see things clearly again. Was it Tolstoy or Monet helping me? Or both? In the evenings around sunset Mike and I like to sit overlooking the valley and watch the wild ducks flying upriver to the reservoir where they spend their nights. Occasionally we have a bonus and see a big heron (garza real) flapping sedately by. Yesterday evening we saw a peregrine falcon sail-hunting high over our valley. That is an indelible experience, a true luxury that doesn’t require a limousine or precious jewels. It’s free.
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Reading, Cooking, Nature, A Sense of Humor
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Sketching Is Less Like Work
I don’t know about you, but for me the sketchbook is where most of the magic happens. It’s freer, more spontaneous, less ponderous that putting paint on canvas or etching a plate. It’s actually fun and if you mess it up it doesn’t matter. By the way, the day you least expect it you can turn some of those sketches into paintings.
My latest creation is a little herb garden in that flat pot that had the pansies in it (see photos). It’s only been going for about three weeks and already we’re harvesting minute amounts of fresh coriander (chopped and sprinkled on top of Mike’s chili con carne) and basil (place the delicate little leaves on top of any pasta dish). It makes for a better life. With a few packets of seeds you can make three or four herb gardens to give to your favorite people. I also enjoy seeing the fulfillment Mike gets from working on his blog, Trump and All the Rest. He takes it seriously and has posted 175 essays over the past three years. He says he’s doing his part to help set the United States on the right track.
María José, my old friend (more like a daughter actually) and assistant in the studio, arrived back from her family summer on the beach a few days ago and we sat down in the studio and plotted together. She’s been prodding me for years to do a particular project and we’ve finally decided to get started on it. (Was that due to Tolstoy, Zola or Mark Twain? I’m not sure, but I’m eternally grateful to all of them.) Now I’m also feeling the need to start some big work. Painting with big brushes on big canvases is exciting, especially when you’ve got those sketches as roadmaps.
What Does the Future Hold?
The future holds what it’s always held: work, play, progress, surprises, setbacks, joy, sadness, disappointment and lots more. But the most important thing, whatever lands on your plate, is what the Spanish call “ilusión.” That’s not illusion in the sense of trickery, magic or mystery. It’s more about joyous anticipation. Here comes the future! Bring it on! So, what do you do? You do what you have always done. Trust your serendipity and be creative.
The past six months have reminded me of my two favorite Spanish sayings:
“No hay mal que por bien no venga.” Nothing bad ever happens that doesn’t bring something good along with it.
“Todos los días son días de aprender.” Every day is a day to learn something.
It was the end of February and I had just had a group in my studio of 18 art students from The American School in Switzerland (TASIS). I worked with two assistants, María José and Carmen (bottom right in the photo), which permitted us, in addition to teaching, to produce a volume of work, enough to mount a show when the students got back home. It was a print production experience and it worked wonderfully well. Everybody was delighted with their prints and I was ready for a rest.
This TASIS class was the largest group I ever had in my studio. In fact, some of them worked in the Gallinero on the long workbench and outside on the terrace. Martyn Duke, the art teacher (far left, glasses), and Frank Long, the photography teacher (far right, top), two great people to work with, walked the students from the hotel over to my studio every morning. Afterwards a great grandfather sitting on a bench under a big plane tree in the village plaza said it was like the old days when shepherds would herd their sheep and goats through the middle of town on their way upriver to the mountains.
It Was a Long Rest
I didn’t realize then that we were in for a six-month–and counting–rest, as the coronavirus lockdown started shortly afterwards. Life changed radically. No more escapadas to our favorite fried-fish-and-chilled-white-wine bars. No more visits to and from friends and family. No more students. What day is it? What is the meaning of life, anyway? Are we going to get out of this alive?
Essentially I think the most important tool for dealing with dramatically unexpected circumstances is creativity. I’m always saying that creativity is not just about modeling clay or putting paint on canvas. It’s about everything we do in life. It’s our most important resource, especially in tricky times.
How to start? First of all, reading. Mike bought me an ereader for Christmas and downloaded tons of quality books. I started with Tolstoy–what a revelation–Mark Twain, Dickens, biographies of Caesar and Bonaparte, among other greats. (Conclusion: Nothing has changed.) Then cooking, first spending a month nurturing sourdough bread and pancakes (Mike says sourdough is an extraterrestre.) We’ve almost eliminated meat from our diet, replacing it with dozens of variations on different kinds of beans. Then cakes and baked apples. Oh, I almost forgot the big homemade jam selection. Our son has a fruit orchard. That helps. It’s creativity you can spread on pancakes.
As it turned out, we were lucky. We weren’t totally locked down, The regulation had a loophole for people to walk their dogs, so Diva saved our health and sanity. We would take her for walks along the old Sierra Nevada tram line or the river walk almost every day.
Another bright side: They say adapting to change keeps you young. So, when the initial shock began to wear off I decided to go back to painting. Painting was my first love, but I hadn’t had much time for it since the late 70s when I took up printmaking. Now the time was right. I even had oodles of paint and canvases I’d been buying over the years for a future when I could paint again.
Sometimes Mike Would Take a Camera
What’s Next?
Next is to keep on coping. To continue dealing with changes, surprises, alarms, disappointments, simple pleasures, polishing one’s sense of humor. If adapting to change makes you young we’ll be 10 years old before this is over. And that’s a good thing, as President Trump says Covid-19 doesn’t kill anybody… except old people.
Maureen is from Manchester, U.K. In her last incarnation there she was a suburban housewife with two small children. That was in 1964 and she was feeling restless again. She had always been restless, at school, in church, in her job as a secretary earning coolie wages in the Manchester textile sector. This time it was bigger. She wanted out of suburbia, out of Little England. She had experienced only two weeks of sunshine in the previous year and yearned to feel the sun. She had painted her children’s bedroom walls with a bullfighter theme. Painting made her happy. She had attended a few night classes with a professor from the Stockport College of Art. “I needed to know how to stretch a canvas,” she says. After a half-dozen lessons the art professor said to her, “You don’t need to come any more. Just go home and draw everything.” She sold her first couple of portraits and thought the life of the artist would be easy.
One day, when her husband arrived home from work as a sales rep, she said to him, “Let’s move to Spain.” They had been on holiday a couple of times on the Costa Brava on Spain’s northern Mediterranean coast and enjoyed it.
In July 1964 she stepped off a plane at the Málaga airport, a thousand kilometers south of the Costa Brava. She was shepherding her two children and struggling with the carry-on luggage. Her husband was waiting there to drive them to their new home, a cobblestone, Roman-tiled fishing village 50 kilometers up the coast. As she stepped out the door of the plane she was buffeted by a wave of heat like nothing she had ever experienced before. She wondered if she had done the right thing.
Time Flies
Flash forward a half century. She’s sitting midst easels and etching presses, stacks of canvases and exotic papers, worriedly anticipating the return of the wren that built his nest outside her studio window last week–and looking back over a life that took her by surprise.
Q: What happened?
A: We sold our house in England and pooled the money with another English couple to build a restaurant/bar and 12 apartments on a bluff over a Mediterranean beach in southern Spain. We ran the business working alternate weeks for a few years, the wives cooking and the husbands doing the shopping and tending the bar.
A couple of years in I rented the whole top floor of an old house overlooking a big vegetable patch and made it into a wonderful studio. The woman who owned the house was called Conchita Bueno and she was truly buena. I would paint there during the off weeks and any other time I could steal. Sometime during the fourth year, with the business taking off and me selling some paintings, I got restless again. We didn’t speak hardly any Spanish and we had never really integrated with the villagers. What’s more, the town was turning into a tourist trap for wayward Brits and Northern Europeans who formed English-speaking cliques and whose idea of adventure was to go to a “native” bar. It wasn’t an ideal place to raise children. I felt that I needed to get out of there. But how? I badly needed some serendipity.
It came along in the form of an American lad who wore cut-off jeans in mid-winter and always carried a couple of cameras. He moved into the ugly new block of flats opposite our restaurant and began coming over for breakfast, and we had time for long chats. It turned out he was writing articles for American newspapers and was determined to stay in Europe. He liked fried bread, had never heard of it. One morning he and I made mayonnaise together in the kitchen, him pouring the oil slowly into the bowl and me whipping it into the eggs with a wire whisk. Shortly afterwards we coincided at a party of those boring expats and spent the whole night in a corner reading aloud to each other from a book of Yeats’ poems. We read Beggar to Beggar Cried. That did it.
Q: What happened then?
A. Two weeks later I was back on the plane with my kids, headed to my parents’ house in Manchester. I was there for six months working in my brother’s flower shop while my soon-to-be second husband searched for a “real” Spanish village well off the Mediterranean coast, found one, rented a house there, and helped the owner install a bathroom. We’ve lived in that village ever since. It hasn’t changed much as it’s in a steepish valley that doesn’t have much room for “development.” Here we raised my two kids and one of our own.
Becoming a Printmaker
Eventually we bought an old house and fixed it up. As we had no money left nor collateral, the village mayor co-signed a loan for us to do the renovation. That is how our pueblo has treated us. Some years later we built the studio and converted the goat shed into an office for Mike and have happily lived and worked here ever since. Much later we built a cabin to accommodate the print artists who came from all over the world to attend my printmaking workshops. Workshops are what you do when a disastrous world economic crisis slows your flow of art sales to a drip. Even in this I was lucky. My husband was a freelance journalist and photographer who had worked in PR in the US, so it didn’t take him long to adapt to being an artist’s online publicist. Try googleing “printmaking courses in Spain” and see the first results.
This was the etching studio of the Rodríguez-Acosta Foundation in 1979-80
Q: How did you become a printmaker?
A: More serendipity. Louise Waugh, a wonderful English watercolorist friend, stopped by the studio one day with some beautiful etching proofs. I was astounded. How did she do that? She said she had been accepted to study in the etching studio of the Fundación Rodríguez-Acosta in Granada. “You just take a portfolio of your work and leave it with them, and then go back after a week to see if you’ve been accepted.” I did. I was. A whole new world opened up for me. I worked there for two-and-a-half years, under the direction of the magical printmaking maestro, José García Lomas, “Pepe Lomas,” who had been exquisitely formed in Barcelona and Paris. Pepe liked his students to be earnest and I was certainly that, so he spared no effort to see to it that I mastered his traditional techniques. It’s a good thing I did. Everything starts there.
The Creative Life
Q: Let’s talk about the creative life. How do you see it looking back?
A: And forward. That’s something I need to clear up. A writer friend of ours recently turned 40 and expressed concern about being “past her prime.” What nonsense. You’re never past your prime until you stop struggling. I made my first print when I was 37. Consider Georgia O’Keeffe, nearing 98, virtually blind, and still painting.
As for “the creative life,” Mike and I have discussed it a lot. We agree that authentic creativity goes beyond putting paint on canvas or ink on plates. For us an artist’s first mission is to take responsibility for crafting a creative life. That can mean different things for different artists but the essential part is about making a vital and artistic ecosystem for yourself, tailor made for your own needs, tastes, challenges and aspirations. And don’t fail to leave some space for serendipity.
Don’t worry what other people think of your lifeplan. It’s for you, not for them. Do you want to raise chihuahuas or learn Mandarin. You can do that, and more. When I was headed back to Spain in 1969 to start a new life my two brothers, both successful businessmen, expressed their grave concern for me. They thought I was crazy. Forty-some years later they came down individually for visits, and both confided to me, “I wish I had done what you did.”
Q: Do you have any advice for young artists who are starting out, say, where you were in the mid-sixties?
A: I can make some general suggestions, but every artist is a world apart. First and foremost is the importance of actually working, filling sketchbooks, painting, making prints. If you don’t do that conscientiously it’s all pointless. Inevitably, what you are seeking, to live from your art, entails some risk, but it need not be an impediment. There’s a simple formula for taking the stress out of it: Figure out what your wildest dream is and give it a try. The worst that can happen is that you have to go home and get a job.
You’ll have to sell some work, of course. You’ll need to exhibit and participate in art fairs and other cultural events. Whether or not you ever sell much work over Internet, a compelling presence on the Web will be an important element in your success. Your story is just as important as your work and you’ll need to develop it and find interesting ways to divulge it. Right now the media for that are websites and blogs, videos and podcasts and, of course, social media. Later there will be something else but the essential element will still be your story: your humanity, your humor, your best teacher, your hopes, your unexpected successes, the morning light on your nasturtiums, your cat, and your trip to Tasmania or the Grand Canyon. Don’t worry about including any sales pitches. The captivating life and times of a full-time professional artist is sales pitch enough, and your potential clients will appreciate your low-key presentation.
More Preparation
It would be good to study something, too, regardless of whether you get a degree. You will learn how to learn and this will serve you well when it comes time to build a a website or a sailboat. Don’t laugh. A dear artist friend of ours in Colorado makes lovingly- crafted three-quarter size Indian canoes and people hang them from their ceilings.
Travel all you can. Read all you can. Without it you cannot become a complete artist–or person. Read quality fiction and non-fiction. Everything fits into the artist’s blender.
Q: Do you have more suggestions, something to help artists survive a crisis?
A: I discussed that more extensively in an article I wrote some years ago. Here’s a link to it.
Q: What about working space and conditions? How important are they?
A: Ample workspace is essential for a visual artist, especially considering that you might need to mount courses in there. That studio is your sacred space and you must devote some thought and resources to it. You also need privacy and tranquility. At first you may need a day job, but don’t let it prevent you from spending quality time in your studio. Program that into your life. Set some objectives, make some plans. Write them down. They will help you navigate the hard times to come.
Think about what kind of work you’re going to do, how commercial you can go without compromising your creativity and your self respect. Who are you going to sell to and how? Resist the temptation to spend time and effort cultivating rich clients. Normal people–teachers, nurses, programmers, office workers, small business people and the like, are better, more loyal and constant. They will think of you when they need wedding presents or portraits. Then, if a rich client comes along, that’s OK, too.
Don’t despise anyone. My best client for paintings (this was before etchings) when I started out in Granada was a young pharmacy employee. He would phone me occassionally and say, “I’ve got some money saved, Maureen. Can I come out and have a look-around?” We’re still friends.
Q: What about the coronavirus pandemic? How do you think that is going to influence the lives of artists?
A: I think that’s impossible to predict at the moment. The first thing that occurs to me is that involuntary lockdown has given artists valuable time to think and observe, time they have never taken before. I hope they take good advantage of it. As for national and world events, they could go from revolutionary social and political changes to just more of the usual muddling through. Only one thing is clear to me: our creativity–in the broadest sense of the word–will be stretched to its limits Artists may have to plant potatoes. In any case, look on the bright side. Creativity is what artists are good at.
“Where can I see a selection of your work?” Right here! I’ve gone into the files and pulled out a representative sample of my work over the years. I’ve done it by categories: acid etchings, solarplate prints, linocuts, oil paintings, etc. Some of the paintings are for sale and most of the editions still have prints available, so if you see anything you think you might like to purchase, just drop me an email (maureenluciabooth(at)gmail.com) and we can discuss it. (Click on the images to enlarge them and open up a slide show.) Here we go:.
Recent Work / Obra Reciente
Bronze Sculptures
Movie Making and Lorna
Solarplate Prints / Estampas Solares
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Liquid Metal Prints / Estampas de Metal Líquido
Deborah Maris Lader of the Chicago Printmakers’ Collective
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Acid Etchings / Grabados al Ácido
Artists and art lovers at the first edition of “SaloArt,” the art exhibition in the Moorish Castel which crowns the town of Salobreña on the Mediterrean coast of Granada. (See more photos in the album at the bottom of this post.)
D. Federico Mayor Zaragoza inaugurated the first edtion of SaloArte.
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Screen Prints / Serigrafías
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Linocuts / Linograbados
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Oil Paintings / Óleos
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Watercolors / Acuarelas
Alhambra Prints / Estampas con tema Alhambra
These are the first prints from my series on Granada’s Alhambra palace and fortress. Though it’s located barely five miles down the hill from our house, I’ve avoided the Alhambra as a subject for years because of the danger of doing something trite. It’s been done to deathby artists from around the world over the past 200 years. But I’m encouraged by my experiments with liquid-metal techniques, which have obliged me to work fast and loose, and I’m quite pleased with the results.
One surprise in this experience is that some of the ghost prints turned out more interesting than the first prints pulled off the plates, as you can see in these pictures. Also, learning to print plates with relief on them has been a challenge.
So, please take a look at these new prints and let me know what you think. Or, if you like, come to my studio in Granada and we’ll work on something together!
Due to the countrywide quarantine order we’ve been confined to our home for more than two weeks now but we haven’t managed to get bored yet. Admittedly we’re lucky. We have a garden and some sunny terraces. So I dabble in paint. In normal times I don’t have much time for painting, my first love, since I’ve got so much printmaking stuff to do. Mike works on his blog and in the garden, makes pictures and walks the dogs. That’s the loophole in the lockdown order, you’re permitted to walk your dog. Very civilized, I thought. And just opposite our house, on the other side of the river, we’ve got an old tram line that’s perfect for the purpose.
I want to share with you some of the photographs he has made over the past couple of weeks. Actually, being locked down has its positive side. There are lots of annoying duties that you can’t possibly do, so you get to leave them. That gives you time for stuff you never have time for, sitting on the terrace round sunset watching the ducks and herons flying up the river till it’s too dark to see them; watching films and series and, especially, YouTube documentaries. (Here’s a link to one we loved.) And relaxing deeply, as if you were on holiday or at someone else’s house.
So, here’s some pictures. Be well and come and see us when you can.
These TASIS Students Have Redefined the “Work” in Workshop
Martyn Dukes and Frank Long returned again this year with their art and photography students for their third printmaking workshop with Maureen. After missing the first of four days due to a cancelled flight from Milan and a long trip via Zurich the following day they should have been tired. But no, determined to make up for lost time they marched right into the studio for Maureen’s orientation talk, so they were primed to go the next morning. Another factor that got them off to a running start was the stack of drawings and photos on acetate that they had prepared previously.
So while they worked on new acetates in the studio under Maureen’s supervision, her assistants, Carmen and María José (bottom right in the photo), started exposing and inking solar plates and running them through the two etching presses. The system worked well and permitted the students to achieve a surprising production of prints in just three days working mornings and afternoons. They barely stopped long enough to eat lunch, though on the last day they managed to fit in a stroll around the high spots of Granada.
Congratulations to all of you. You couldn’t have done it any better. P.S. You will be happy to know that both María José and Carmen remarked how polite and cordial all of the students were–and how saintly patient Martyn and Frank were.
Here’s the pictures:
Would you like to see some of Maureen’s artwork? Here’s a link.
Puedes conocer este laboratorio de la magia del arte desde hoy hasta el día 6 de enero, visperas de Reyes
Allí te espera una experiencia artística única–convivir con una artista profesional durante unos minutos en el estudio donde ha dedicado muchos años a crear su arte original en varios formatos: obra gráfica, pintura y escultura. No lo pierdas.
Se puede concertar una cita o bien por teléfono o por email:
Hay obras grandes y chiquititas, pinturas, grabados y esculturas, que te van a encantar. Y los precios de las piezas son asequibles, sobre todo los grabados.
Puedes llamarla or enviarle un email para concertar una visita al estudio a partir del viernes, día 20 de diciembre hasta el 6 de enero, vísperas de Reyes.
You’re Invited to Drop by and Visit the Studio where Maureen Has Created these Sculptures, Paintings and Graphic Work.
And if you find a piece that strikes your fancy, you can even aquire it, either for your own home or as a Christmas gift for someone you love. Maureen will be at home every day starting Friday, December 15 until Monday, January 6th. You can phone her to make an appointment (34 605341632).
Here are a few samples of work that is still available, and there is a lot more in her studio.
Podéis subir a conocer su obra en el estudio donde se han elaborado los grabados, las pinturas y esculturas
Y si hay una pieza que te capte, hasta puedes adquirirla, o bien para tu propia casa o como regalo de Reyes para un ser querido. Maureen estará a tu disposición todos los días desde el viernes, 15 de diciembre hasta el lunes, séis de enero. Se puede concertar la visita llamándole por teléfono–605341632.
He aquí unas cuantas muestras de la obra disponible, pero hay muchas cosas más en el estudio.
Days Full of Printmaking, Seafood, White Wine and Laughs
When Mary was leaving after her first course with Maureen she said, “I want to come back here with my husband, Robert. So I’ll be seeing you again.” That was eight years ago, but Mary kept her word. In the meantime she has set up her own printmaking workshop at home in a small town outside Milan, Italy and she wanted to do a refresher course with her maestra before beginning serious work.
“I’m so glad I came back,” said Mary. “I learned so much making prints with Maureen this time. It was so fun working with gold leaf. I’ve got some at home but I never knew how to use it. This visit served to convinced me that I need to come back a third time and stay longer! And Robert doesn’t object. He had so much fun. He wants to come back to visit the great little seafood bar Mike and Maureen took us to and to eat another of Mike’s paellas on their terrace.”
I never expected to do any sculpture, but I stopped by my friend, Esperanza Romero’s studio one day and she was working on a piece of clay. She saw I was fascinated and set me up with a lump of clay and some advice for a beginner. And out came Diva. I was hooked. I made more figures and have had them cast in bronze. Here they are.
This is Diva, our chihuahua when she was a puppy. I tried to capture some of her puppiness and, yes, her ears were that big. At least the appeared that way to me.
This one is called “Cacolina.” She was our first small dog. When a friend offered her to us as a pup, Mike said, “Thanks but no, we prefer big dogs.” Up until that time we had had mastiffs and great danes. “So the friend said, “Look, just take her home with you. If she doesn’t work out you can bring her back.” That was the end of mastiffs for us. She went on to mother a whole dynasty of little rough-haired terriers we called “Cacolinos.” I did this figure from memory.
I call this one “Siesta.” It’s from memory, too.
This is “The Kiss,” also from my imagination. Cacolina made her way into this one, too.
You Can Purchase One If You Like, Or More Than One
All of these pieces are for sale. I’ve decided to present them in editions of seven each. They will be designated: MLucia, 1/7…7/7, and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
If you see a piece you would like to acquire, please email me and we’ll discuss the arrangements. My email is: maureenluciabooth(at)gmail.com.
Jan Reawakens Her Printmaking Enthusiasm in Granada
Jan Stickland is coming back. After two serious operations in the past year, she decided to try her newly recovered wings with a solo trip to Spain from her home in Australia and an intensive printmaking workshop with Maureen here in Granada. She achieved both with high marks. When she left she was full of ideas, plans and a determination to buy an etching press and set up her own studio at home. “Maureen made me see that it was not only possible but necessary,” says Jan. “The truth is I always feel best when I’m making art.”
Jan is a country girl, raised in a village in the state of Victoria where her mother would pack her a lunch in the morning and she could spend the entire day walking alone in the woods. “I got to know every inch of that forest,” she says nostalgically. Having spent her professional life as a primary school teacher, with what she refers to as a “disjointed relationship with art,” Jan is now retired with her children grown up and independent. “It’s time to get back to art,” she says, adding, “I confess, though, that my principal motive for coming to work with Maureen was not mainly about printmaking. It was to relax and clear my head. But Maureen quickly took me far beyond that. This became a working holiday. We worked hard together and I learned more in a short time than ever before in my life, and not just about printmaking techniques and creative printing, but also studio practice and organization. In her studio Maureen seems always to have the materials she needs–down to an important scrap of grandmother’s lace or a pressed flower–close at hand. She buys most of her materials on Internet and they are delivered to her door.
This was Jan’s second visit to Spain. She was here last year after being chosen to represent Australia in the IMPACT 10 Encuentro, the tenth edition of the International Multidisciplinary Printmaking Conference created by the University of the West of England which was held in the city of Santander, Spain, from September 1 to 9, 2018. Jan had another compelling reason to visit Spain. Her son married a Spanish girl and they live in a hillside village in the province of Alicante just a 15-minute drive from the Mediterranean coast.
In answer to the question, “Why printmaking?” Jan replies, “It’s the serendipity, the magic that happens every time you pull that blanket back off a freshly pressed print.”
While Jan was here she also found time in the afternoons to stroll through the village and try its restaurants. One of those afternoons she coincided with the annual “Fiesta del Agua” and joined in the fun with the village young people. On her last afternoon, she accompanied Maureen on a delightful walk through a pine forest (“ahh, the smell…”) located 1,000 vertical meters above the village, where it’s 6-8ºC cooler on summer afternoons. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Jan coming back one of these years. It’s not just the printmaking. There is also her family down there in Alicante, just a short bus ride away.
This group of high-school juniors, from Germany, Russia, the USA and Spain all attend Bremen’s International Baccalaureate school and study art under Brenda Eubank. This is the seventh (eighth?) successive year that Brenda brings her students to Maureen’s studio to do a printmaking workshop. (Note: Brenda notifies us by email that the first workshop Maureen had with the students from Bremen was in 2011, so this year’s visit was the ninth. Time flies.)
This year, under Maureen’s guidance, they made three collective artists’ books. It sounds complicated and it was but the results gratified everybody.
I just found this in my visitors’ book and was moved by it:
Dear Maureen and Mike,
Thank you so much for the most memorable printmaking experience I have ever had. At the same time I realized that you were a mother to me in so many ways, especially in printmaking. I will always cherish my time with you in the studio working out my complicated project.
You are very creative and have many ideas and I appreciate your mentorship in the business of art. You have taught me what it means to be a working artist.
Mike was a friend to my husband, Rich, and I know he enjoyed the walks and working together on the technical issues such as the wife. Mike is awesome! The paella was excellent and I loved meeting all your friends and family. And, to top it off, the spa treatment every other day did us wonders. You have been a true blessing all around. We will be sending some salmon from Alaska (wild caught) for sure.
Love you and Mike,
Rhonda & Rich XX OO XX OO
Thank you, Rhonda. The feeling is mutual. We hope to see you back here whenever you can make it.
Alaskan Artist, Rhonda Horton, Braves 30-Hour Flight to Come to Maureen’s Workshop
Rhonda and her husband, Rich, had been planning this trip, their first to Europe, for more than a year. For Rhonda it was more than a vacation. It was an opportunity to work intensively–one on one–for two weeks with an Old World master printmaker and to collect some ideas for establishing her own printmaking studio at home. At the end of her time in Granada she hoped to have produced an exquisite artist’s book. And she did.
Rhonda had scrupulously prepared a full set of pencil drawings on paper as the basis to create an artist’s book on Alaskan sea birds. After admiring them Maureen said, “These are drawings are great but to achieve maximum image quality on solarplates they should be re-drawn in India ink on acetates.” She showed Rhonda how it was done and Rhonda spent her few first morning and afternoons preparing beautiful new drawings.
Then they decided on a format, adaptated to some elongated sheets of handmade Indian paper that Maureen had selected for Rhonda’s artist’s book, and burned the images on the plates. Maureen happened to have on hand some beautifully textured handmade paper acquired from the Paperki paper mill in Hondarribia, Spain, 30 years ago for the cover of the book. Rhonda loved some work that Maureen had done with chine collé and decided to incorporate that technique into her book project, as well.
Then it was just a question of printing up the images and assembling them meticulously into three artist’s books. Rhonda called it “Quiet Song” after a poem that occurred to her on awaking one morning in Maureen’s Gallinero artist’s cabin:
Quiet song, show me the morning A shout before noon, show me the day Birds of the shore, show me the night.
A special element in creating ambiente throughout the whole process was Rhonda’s husband, Rich, occasionally sitting quietly at the end of the studio playing his guitar and singing. The delicious atmosphere he achieved was like having a Rennaisance troubador providing live-music accompaniment in an artist’s studio.
Maureen attributes the success of their work together to the fact that Rhonda arrived with a clear project in mind with the images already worked out. The finished product is an exquisite piece of work that reflects the input of both Rhonda and Maureen. The effort expended by both over two weeks is evident in the proud, hard-working faces of both in the second and third photographs in the montage below.
José Quiros (“Rescoldo”) spent his youth shepherding his family’s sheep and cattle on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range above the Granada village of Güéjar Sierra in Spain. José had an abiding restlessness. There was something he was destined to do, but he had yet to figure out what it was. In the meantime he would put carefully-folded butcher’s paper and a pencil in his knapsack along with the lunch his mother prepared him for his day on the mountain. There was plenty of time to think up there and for putting his impressions down on paper.
In 1985, when he was 21, a friend advised José that there was a British artist living in the next village down the road and that maybe he could show her some of his work. This is how Maureen met José. After looking at his drawings and paintings she took him directly to the Granada art school to meet José García Lomas, the etching professor there, the same one who had been her maestro in the Fundación Rodríguez Acosta printmaking studio a few years before. The old master was impressed with José‘s sketches and managed to get him into his etching classes mid term via the back door.
José spent the next four years etching off and on with Pepe Lomas and, after he left the art school, remained a lifetime friend of his etching master. Their favorite times together were scouring the Andalusian countryside for archeological artifacts. When Pepe saw José’s building project finished he said, “This is a work of art, the whole house, not just the wall hangings.”
José’s building project wasn’t a house in the beginning. It was a painting studio. He needed a place to paint. That’s how the building got that south-east looking panoramic window on the second floor overlooking the mountains. Besides offering a stunning view it admits beautiful light for working. “The steep rocky canyon reminded me of my longtime desire to have a house of stone and wood,” says José. “Maybe I was influenced by the stone walls and stations along the old tram line that passed beneath our village on its way up to the Hotel del Duque, and maybe by the grand old hotel itself.” The hotel, which opened as a gambling casino around the turn of the 20th century, remains in excellent condition today, though it has been repurposed by the church as a center for ejercicios espirituales, “spiritual exercises.”
Whatever the inspiration, José decided to do the building project himself, with his own two hands. It took him seven years. His only previous building experience was three months as a hod carrier. Never mind, he would invent solutions as he went along. He was lucky in that his building project coincided with a period in Granada–the late 80s–when many noble houses and public buildings were being demolished to make way for coldly-geometrical Bauhaus-influenced modern apartment blocks. “There were wonderful old bricks, pillars and beams lying around all over Granada,” says José. So he would approach the foremen on the demolition crews, explaining to them that he was building a house and asking if he could haul away some of the vintage materials they were throwing away. “Those were the days when centuries-old pine and oak beams, some of them engraved, were being cut up to fuel bakery ovens in Granada,” says José. “So nobody told me no,” adding reflexively, “It’s curious how life has provided me with what I’ve needed as I went along.”
It wasn’t until the house was nearly finished that José discovered it had unexpected magical qualities. “The big round ojo de buey window was one of the last elements I put in,” he says. “I sat down to amire it–I remember it was late spring–and suddenly I noticed a pair of golden eagles flying back and forth to the rock face opposite, taking food to their chicks.
The house sits in an interesting area surrounded by trees and little family patches of mountain agriculture. The River Genil runs down the bottom of the valley and there are walking and mountain biking paths that will take you up to the source of the river and beyond into the high Sierra Nevada.
Asked what kind of person might buy his house, José replies, “I don’t know. Maybe an artist or musician, or some other sensitive person.”
As for what he intends to do after selling the house, his reply is straightforward: “Do? I’ll do the same thing I do now, enjoy life.” That said, he does confess a long-standing desire to mount a Mongolian pony.
Contact José Quiros at: joserescoldo (at) gmail.com
As José doesn’t speak English, if you don’t speak Spanish you can email me at: mikebooth61 (at) gmail.com.
Dear Old Friends Bob and Eunice Stack Throw a Spanish-Style Goodbye Wingding after Their Umpteenth Summer Stay in Güéjar Sierra
Güéjar Sierra, August 20, 2018–Monday lunchtime in the Restaurante La Hacilla and a long table of friends is assembled to eat lunch, laugh together and bid goodbye to old friends and regular summer visitors for the past 45 years, Bob and Eunice Stack, who head back to New York with their family on Wednesday. It’s always great to spend time with Bob and Eunice and enjoy their flawless hospitality. They are the best–and best loved–people we know, real role models for growing old gracefully. Thanks for a lovely lunch dear friends.
Here are the photos. Click on one to enlarge them. Then right click the enlargement to download it.
Virtually Lost to Art Since Her Art School Days, Sarah Initiates a Welcome Return
Sarah Jarvis studied painting and textiles (Chelsea School of Art) and then lived in the business world all her working life. Though, it’s not as if locating, gutting and renovating, equipping and running an Andalusian farmhouse hotel with her husband, Matt, since 2014 isn’t work. Still, the yearning for art in her life never left her. Her dream was to convert one of the rooms in their country house into a printmaking studio. But there were so many questions pending. It had been a long time. Was she capable of making her plan work?
At this point she discovered Maureen on the web. “I just googled ‘Printmaking Spain’ and there she was,” says Sarah, who showed up at the studio a few days later. After looking over some of Sarah’s sketches, Maureen suggested that Sarah base her first prints on some animal drawings she had done a few years ago and showed her how to prepare the images on acetates in order to create solar-plate prints.
The first print was a sign of things to come. It was crisp, bold and arresting, with a graphic quality that a lot of printmakers strive a long time to achieve. By the time she went home Sarah had a stack of prints. When Maureen said to her, “You’ve got the beginning of an exhibit there,” Sarah’s eyes lit up. She was on her way.
Asked to discuss her experience in the studio with Maureen, Sarah said, “It was amazing, actually. Maureen has allowed me to feel that I could become an artist. She’s given me the necessary confidence. She doesn’t train people to be like her. She looks for the best in each person. Also, the setting here is so inspiring, from the mountains, the grapevines and the flowers, to the Gallinero (henhouse) artists cabin. It’s all so idyllic.”
Sarah’s parting comment says it all: “I’m going to create a studio of my own. Now I’m convinced I can do it.”
“Three days with Maureen helped me find my former artistic self.”
Kate MacKinnon is one of those unusual people who thrive on learning and never stop. She just spent three days in the studio with Maureen and got stuck into a new challenge: printmaking. As with everything else, she’s serious about it.
Kate graduated with a degree in psychology from Hobart William Smith Colleges, a great little liberal arts school in upstate New York, then hitchhiked around Europe for four months before going to work in 1989 for Chase Manhattan Bank–which later became part of JP Morgan Chase–and stayed there until 2017 when she took an early retirement.
She seemingly came out of that experience unscathed. She’s not the least bit “bankish;” in fact she’s eminently normal. So how did she manage it? “I always worked in technology,” she says, “and I was surrounded by intelligent people. I learned on the job, from them. I had some people skills.” Kate underrates herself. Her people skills are such that she could swim in shark-infested waters if she had to.
Asked what she discovered working with Maureen she replies, “I discovered how much she knows about printmaking and, just as important as that, how willing she is to share her knowledge. Time spent with Maureen in the studio one-on-one not only teaches you printmaking. She also conveys some rich lifestyle wisdom. Some of it’s Spanish, some of it’s of her own creation. She’s living every artist’s dream.”
“One of the great things about working with Maureen is the accommodation. It’s a cabin built into a mountainside with great comfort, workspace, privacy and views. I slept well the first night and on the second day started taking siestas. And there’s an added attraction. It’s just 40 steps–I counted them.–from the studio.”
I’ve been invited to exhibit during the Semana Cultural (Cultural Week) runup to our village’s summer fete. I’ll be showing a good friend from here, Inma López. We inaugurate the show on Sunday, the 29th of July and it’s on through the month of August. I haven’t exhibited in a long time but this time it’s like everything else in our pueblo, friendly, fun and easy. The town hall installed beautiful new lighting in the exhibition space and came up to the house with a truck to pick up my work.
Here are the pictures Mike made for my part the catalog, along with some of Inma and me after the hanging. She’s a great person to work with. More than 30 years ago, when I was giving outdoor painting classes to the kids in the village, she was one of the participants–at the age of 14.
See you there if you can make it. If not, Mike will make some pictures at the inauguration and post them here.
Three Experienced Artists Discover Solar Plate Secrets in My Studio
Maruja Cantos, Carmen Lopez-Nieto and Isabel Manteca left yesterday after spending time with me in my studio exploring the creative possibilities of solarplate printmaking. Solarplate has an undeserved bad reputation because it is so often limited to simply reproducing photographs, which reduces the results of the technique to bad photocopies.
For me the secret of quality solarplate prints is to create your images directly on the acetate, taking care to balance the contrasts and assure clear linework. What you do not achieve on the acetate will not appear in the print. I also place a lot of emphasis on the creative printing of the plates. There are so many options when it comes to printing solar plates.
Working with professional artists, given their years of experience with images, becomes an intensive collaborative experience. It’s also fun.
On the last morning, Mike and I accompanied them to the village churrería for a breakfast of churros, the Spanish version of irresistibly unhealthy fried batter. Breakfast ended with the traditional flurry of Spanish goodbye hugs and kisses and they were off, all promising to come back soon. I hope they do. They were all such delightful people.
An International Group of Young Artists from IB Bremen Get Into Inked Plates
Brenda Eubanks-Ahrens is back this year with the cream of her art class from the International Baccalaureate School from Bremen, Germany, eight young people with artistic leanings. I’m always impressed when I see just how serious they are about image making. It’s so satisfying working with these kids. For most of them it’s the first time they’ve ever been in an artist’s studio, and I feel privileged to have introduced them to their first one. Perhaps a bit of art magic will stay with them throughout their lives.
The weather was perfect; we ate out on the terrace in the shade of the grape vines every day. Mike was the cook and almost didn’t have enough time to make the photographs. In the end he was able to supplement those he made with some that my assistant, María José, made with her cell phone. (Thank you María José.)
As close as I can remember, Lorna Ryan-Burden came to work in my studio with me the first time in 2011. This talented Australian artist came with her husband, Roger, who researched a lot of tapas bars with Mike, while Lorna delved into solar-plate and liquid metal printmaking with me in the studio.
A couple of years later they stopped by again, on their way from Australia to England to visit family. By then Lorna had evolved her techniques a lot and won a few printmaking prizes around Australia. She was full of the enthusiasm that comes from winning prizes and selling work.
I was surprised and delighted last fall when I received an email from Lorna saying they were planning to come back to Europe in the spring of 2018 and could they stop by for a week in The Gallinero and some creative printing practice with me in the studio. They have just left after a very productive week. Have a look at the photos Mike made in the studio shortly before they left. Already we’re looking forward to their fourth visit from Australia.
José’s building project wasn’t a house in the beginning. It was a painting studio. He needed a place to paint. That’s how the building got that south-east looking panoramic window on the second floor overlooking the mountains. Besides offering a stunning view it admits beautiful light for working. “The steep rocky canyon reminded me of my longtime desire to have a house of stone and wood,” says José. “Maybe I was influenced by the stone walls and stations along the old tram line that passed beneath our village on its way up to the Hotel del Duque, and maybe by the grand old hotel itself.” The hotel, which opened as a gambling casino around the turn of the 20th century, remains in excellent condition today, though it has been repurposed by the church as a center for ejercicios espirituales, “spiritual exercises.”
It wasn’t until the house was nearly finished that José discovered it had unexpected magical qualities. “The big round ojo de buey window was one of the last elements I put in,” he says. “I sat down to amire it–I remember it was late spring–and suddenly I noticed a pair of golden eagles flying back and forth to the rock face opposite, taking food to their chicks.
Printmaking Courses in Spain 