I loved my month in Spain, although it was more tourism than a journey of discovery. Maybe I’ve gotten lazy, or maybe it was a little like running out a clock. But tourism is good! Here’s a visual round up of my Spain trip chronologically, city by city.
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Today, I went to a slaughterhouse in Madrid. Called “Matadero” in Spanish, the site is an architectural wonder the city has transformed into an innovative cultural center. https://www.mataderomadrid.org/en/discover Before I arrived, I wondered whether I would feel the ghosts of the center’s past. Instead, I felt joy and gratitude.
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Travel is always enlightening. It is also occasionally disappointing and tiring, and, if you are traveling alone, lonely. Sometimes it is more than all of this. Sometimes you find a “thin place.” A thin place is where the distance between heaven and earth seems shorter, and reveals something deeper. Yesterday, I rode the train from Bilbao to Madrid and found a thin place.
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On Friday, I went on a walking tour to see the murals in the neighborhood of Lavapies with Mimi and Gerardo, both artists themselves. I loved the mural behind them for its playfulness. You can see the reference to Matisse’s dancers in the top mural. Below, the mural is taking a poke at itself: the word “Spectaculum” means a place of entertainment and refers to the way street art can gentrify a neighborhood. So far, Lavapies retains its international not-gentrified character, and is full of immigrants from all over the world with a very strong sense of community.
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The Reina Sofia is Madrid’s modern art museum, with works by Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and George Braque, among many others. One of its current exhibits relates stories of the murderous oppression in Latin America during the past 100 years. You can read more about the exhibit here. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/jun/16/madrid-reina-sofia-latin-america-artistic-boom-enemies-of-poetry This painting by Roberto Matta appears to depict relief from the trauma of war by placing its ambiguous characters in a field of appealing colors, with a sense of balance and what appears to be a spot of sun. The painting is certainly a reference to Picasso’s “Guernica,” on display a few rooms away, which portrays only tragedy. You can read more about what inspired “Guernica” here. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/history-magazine/article/pablo-picasso-guernica-painting-history
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So….instead of writing my usual travel postings, I’m going to post one photo a day with a a little bit of context. Today’s photo was taken in Madrid’s Prado Museum. The painting is “Las Meninas,” by Diego Velazquez. It’s a very complex portrait of a Spanish family that creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures in the painting. I loved it even more after seeing the many ways Picasso deconstructed it in paintings that are exhibited in Barcelona. You can learn more about them here https://kimmie53.com/2020/03/07/catalunyas-many-free-spirits/#more-13292 or here https://www.infobae.com/cultura/2020/10/07/la-belleza-del-dia-las-meninas-de-pablo-picasso/.
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Church at Ghost Ranch
Woo hoo! This week I am exploring New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley between the Sangre De Cristos and the Jemez Mountains in the northern part of the state. The region’s largest cities are Taos in the north, Santa Fe in the middle, and Albuquerque in the south. But forget about them for now. This is about a few of the little guys.
Thirty years ago, I visited the Spanish town of Cuenca and, at the time, I told myself I would return. So I did it, I made it back to Cuenca!
Camino Milagro 