time and travel

I am writing this post from Cuenca, Spain, on the last day of a two-week vacation exploring the southeastern provinces of the country (Valencia and Murcia).  Cuenca, a World Heritage Site, is a beautiful town, with a university in the modern city at the foot of the historic walled town, which occupies a high promontory at the junction of two rivers.  It is also a town very conscious of the visual arts, in large part due to a group of mostly Spanish artists who gathered here in the 1960's and whose work is present in various museums and foundations in the city.

I visited the Museo de Arte Abstracto, and discovered some new favorite painters and paintings. One of these is Fernando Zóbel, whose "Jardín Seco" appears above. Zóbel's work resonated with me, because I find in it many of the tensions that I like to address in my own work.  For example, several of his paintings are organic, almost gestural, flights of paint (indeed reminiscent of birds), yet the same canvas will present a ruler-straight thin line of color at some spot, or a quite mechanical grid of thin black lines that peek thorough from the canvas.  This push-pull of organic and mechanical is one of the tensions that I love.

I sense that there may have been a bit of a shift in my thinking about my own work, that the model inside my head has gained nuances.  I won't really know until I get home and get back to work.  The subtleties of Zóbel's work are inspiring, and the beauty of the art in the Museo de Arte Abstracto renews my faith in my own vision.  I return home more firmly than ever an abstract painter.