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Although I have visited Spain dozens of times during the past 35 years and have often lived there for months at a time, Spain still remains a mystery to me. I have often wondered, Why is this so?  One would think that if you speak Spanish reasonably well, have several close Spanish friends — who have also been your teachers — and have traveled throughout the country, then Spain would become familiar to you, no? like a friend. But it hasn’t. Resolutely, it resists familiarity. This resistance fascinates my imagination.

Why both resistance and fascination? I don’t know; I don’t understand either one. But Spain, that ancient, enigmatic peninsula, bordered between the Atlantic and Mediterranean seas and the Pyrenees mountains, conquered by the Romans, Christianized by Barbarian Goths, occupied by Muslims for nearly 800 years, Spain will tell you stories about itself — and about you, too. You have to open your eyes and ears and your heart and be patient and listen carefully.

And yet, in spite of all that, you still may not get answers.
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In last week’s post, I wrote about an extraordinary Mediterranean house in Paterna, a small town on the outskirts of Valencia. I also posted a photograph of an oil on canvas I had painted in a corner of the garden. The work was a gift for Toti Romero and her husband, Manolo Blasco, who, over the years, had generously allowed me to stay in the house during the summers of some of my visits to Spain. The house was not simply a house. Toti had grown up in it; it had been the center of her life throughout her childhood and adolescence, so it still remained very much her home, even though, for most of the year, she and Manolo and their daughter Elena lived in a spacious flat in Valencia.

The offering of her childhood home to me as a place to live was a gift of generosity and trust that still leaves me, who loves words, without words. I can write about her home and paint images of it, but words of gratitude are inadequate. So are paintings. Even so, in this post I’d like to share with you two images of one of the rooms in the home that became my home. Read More

None of the dozens of paintings I have created in Spain would have been possible without the friendship of Toti Romero and her husband, Manolo Blasco. We met on my first visit to Valencia 30 years ago, in August of 1988. The meeting was not an accident: Toti and Manolo were friends of my brother Tim, and so the gratitude I have for them also extends to him. (There are also many other generous Spaniards involved in the much larger story, especially Paco Julian, but I’ll relate those tales in future posts.)

During that first visit I stayed for several days with Toti and Manolo and their daughter Elena in an unusually beautiful old house in Paterna, a small town a few miles northeast of Valencia. The two-story house was surrounded by walls draped with bougainvillea and shaded by a variety of trees against the relentless Mediterranean sun. Toti had grown up in this house and, even though she, Manolo and Elena lived in a flat in Valencia, they used the house in Paterna as a summer home. Two years later, I had saved enough money to live in Spain for several months; Toti graciously offered her childhood home for me to live in.

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