Author: miguel

During a career as a professional artist for the past 50 years, I have become accustomed to painting unexpected subjects. Especially, it seems, when I’m living in Valencia, Spain. For example, a lovely young friend here once asked me to paint her unclothed (her, not me) because “I’ll never again have the beautiful body I have now. I want to show my grandchildren what I used to look like.”

Then last week my friend Paco asked for a favor. He showed me an oil painting of a woman and wondered if I wouldn’t mind destroying it for him. It was a traditional portrait of his deceased aunt, painted by a well-known Valencian artist in 1974. By “destroying” it, he meant defacing it: Miguel, he said, you can do whatever you want with this woman, especially if you paint a big red X over her. Whatever you do, I’m going to keep her and hang her above my desk.

Evidently he and his aunt did not get along. Had she willed the painting to him out of spite because she knew that he would have had to pay a hefty inheritance tax on it? Was he going to save her defaced image in order to spite her, even in her grave? (He and I will have to talk.)

Meanwhile, yes, I said, but no red X’s! I’ll transform her, but into something beautiful we can both be proud of. So during these next few weeks, I’ll share with you the story of his aunt’s metamorphosis.

Here’s an image of her portrait and my first response: to cut a blindfold out of the fabric of an old umbrella so that her ghost won’t be able to see what I’m up to.

More images will follow in a few days. Thank you for staying in touch.

Painting dreams is a meditation that brings joy: I mean, brushing pasty, colored stuff on a piece of paper or fabric with your fingers and brushes and some water or oil — the act itself — creates joy. And gratitude. Why, I don’t know, so years ago I stopped trying to understand dreams, those invisible visitors, and just painted them as best I could, whenever they happened to tug at my sleeve. However, when you get down to the nub, it’s the same with painting anything else, whether it’s street corners, other human beings, clouds and space, dogs and cats, snowstorms, flowers: the subject doesn’t matter.

For me, everything I want to paint seems to flow out of a feeling of wonder, and paying attention to wonder: What’s going on here? Like those yellow things poking upwards and the red things falling under their own weight? We call them “flowers” and give them names, like “geraniums.’ They grow out of “dirt,” like the green things, called “trees,” that are reflected in what we call “windows.” Everything we see here (and everything we don‘t see) depends on an energy we call “sunlight.” It creates “shadows” on a “wall” that is “weathered.”

Before I die, I would like to paint the energy — the verb, I mean — that flows through these nouns. For the moment, paying homage to flowers on a window sill and stains on the wall of an old house that used to shelter farmworkers, in a summer morning’s sunlight, in the southern part of Switzerland, this brings immeasurable joy, and gratitude. Painting this is just another way of painting dreams.

If I wrote well enough to write a poem, I would write a poem about Playing. On summer afternoons in the south of France, the Mediterranean hardly a breath away, our poem would be about playing pétanque. The object of the game is to toss a steel ball, a boule, so that it gets closest to the target, the cochonnet, than the boules of whomever we are playing against. Or rather, playing with. Because the real object of our game is not to win, but to have fun with friends, and strangers, and with each other.

In the painting, the man in the white shirt has just launched his boule into space. The object of his aim, the cochonnet, is the small, reddish ball in the foreground. As an artist, I was less interested in his accuracy than in the scene itself: the intense attention of the other players, the sunlight and shadows, the summer heat of Provence. And of course, a fascination with summer afternoons, with playing, and with you, wherever you may happen to be.

Those summer days in France happened years ago. Now I’m in a Mediterranean port in Spain, drawing and painting dreams. Summer is ending. October just peeked out from under the skirts of September. Leaves fall, the nights grow longer. On the other side of the world, my country seems to be drowning in waves of mistrust, spite, lies, fear and hatred of other people. Fear and hatred of women too, especially women like you.

From one heart to another, here’s an image of a memory for you, to play with you again, now, wherever you may be. Even if it may not be summer anymore.