Author: miguel

Those who were paying attention in 1935 knew that it was a dark year. The economic catastrophe of the Great Depression raged throughout the world. Josef Stalin killed hundreds of thousands of his fellow Russians and deported millions more. In Italy the Blackshirts crushed any opposition to Mussolini. In violation of the Treaty of Versailles Hitler began rearming Germany. His Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their citizenship. In Spain, generals in the army began plotting to overthrow the Republic.

Those who were paying attention also intuited that 1935 was a tremor, a shadow of a bleaker darkness yet to come. In 1936, Franco and the Spanish generals staged a coup d’état; the resulting civil war would not end until 1939. Hitler’s armies invaded Poland in that same year and began constructing the death camps to which in 1942 he began deporting Jews, gays, Blacks, the disabled and other perceived threats to his regime.

In Picasso’s print of 1935, all the figures, except one, are paying attention. A half-human/half-beast is hungry. Two women gaze at a dove. A man tries to escape up a ladder. A girl-child confronts the monster with her innocence. A beautiful matador lies asleep on a panicked horse, unaware of the menace around her.

Ninety years after 1935, another darkness and other monsters are everywhere. Even here in the United States of Amnesia. I have a dream: The girl awakens the woman and shares the light and flowers. They make a bridle, mount the horse together and challenge the beast. It drops its sword. The women break the blade into bits.

One of the pleasures of drawing outdoors is listening. You hear the normal racket of buses, car horns and motorcycles in the streets, but if you are fortunate to be in a park with trees, sounds are softer. During the autumn months of 2024 when I was living in Spain, in Valencia, you could find me almost any evening in the Jardín del Turia with my pencils and brushes. It’s a park, almost 8 miles long, in an old riverbed. After a terrible flood in 1957, the Valencianos diverted the river around their city and now you will discover joggers, families and picnics, soccer fields, a concert hall, fountains, children’s’ playgrounds, orange trees, the futuristic City of Sciences, yoga and Taiji practitioners, bicyclists and ponds. And an artist seated on a park bench at work.

As I was drawing the bridge, the wind rose. Dark clouds appeared. I heard doves murmuring. They were often out-shouted by the screech of wild parrots who, years ago, had arrived from Africa and had made their homes in the palm trees. From farther away came the sound of drums. Passing directly behind me was the clop-clop sound of horseshoes from four mounted policemen on patrol. Then, right next to me, a shout, a single word, “NO!”

It was a man and woman walking together, but apart. They were arguing in a language we all know: Pain, Hurt and other variants of a language called Love. They paused at the base of the ramp that leads up to the bridge, stared at each other in silence, then continued walking. They stopped between the saints and stared again at each other. Then she reached out and gently caressed his cheek. He took her face in both his hands and they held each other. I drew them as they moved away in each other’s arms toward the darkening clouds. Healing? I hoped.

In Valencia there are at least a dozen bridges that span what used to be the river Turia. This sketch of El Puente del Mar dates from 1988, during my first visit to that lovely city. The bridge was built nearly 400 years earlier in 1591 to replace the previous wooden structure, destroyed by one of the region’s frequent floods.

Bridges: The city in northern Illinois where I grew up many years ago boasted four. They spanned the Fox River but not one was graced with an image of a saint. Nevertheless bridges still enchant me. Saints too. So you can imagine my fascination with this bridge in a Mediterranean port on the other side of the world.

I loved to draw the statues under their protective canopies, their baldacchini. I had little interest in the identity of the saints themselves, more interest in what roles they play. What do they symbolize? Bridges cross voids; ideally they create connections, trade and other peaceful relationships between people and places that are separated. The statues offer their blessings and protection to everyone who travels across to the other side.

In Autumn of 2024 when I made this drawing, news of the November elections in the US were a staple of European media, so living in Spain gave little respite from the flood of fear and hatred coming from demagogues and would-be dictators. But drawing can be an act of meditation: it offers time to reflect and contemplate. I was drawing bridges and saints in a city far away from my home. But in that home, saints and their benedictions had been forgotten long ago, and in my imagination, all the bridges were in flames.