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Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Culture all around please!


The last opera of the year beckons.

The last musical offering of the year for me is ‘Simon Boccanegra’ by Verdi. The plot has all the subtlety of a Revenge Tragedy with death off stage to start, mutiny, plotting, poison, lost children, reconciliation and death on stage to end - but with no ghost! The last production that I saw was with Welsh National Opera and of it I remember nothing, nothing at all! I don’t really know the music so this is all going to be new for me - and I haven’t done my homework and listened to a recording. That at least shows how the crisis is biting: last year I bought CDs of most of the operas I wasn’t able to whistle!

I have at least read the synopsis so the musical posturing can at least be placed in some sort of context. I have not been able to find a libretto in English on the web so that I will be relying on the little LED screen on the seat in front of me to relay the English version of what is being sung on stage. In the Liceu the only surtitles are in Catalan.

On the other artistic front I have squared up the photo of Sitges which is to be the basis for my next painting and I have produced a pencil version which does not look convincing and therefore bodes ill for the next stage when colour is added.

The great thing about the picturesque view of Sitges is that as long as you have a silhouette of the tower of a church next to a filigree bell tower next to a bent palm tree you have encapsulated the most photographed and most easily recognized part of the town.

I am relying on these iconic pieces of architecture and nature giving a clue to the most obtuse of viewers of my finished work. I shall steel myself to hear, “Oh, is it supposed to be Sitges?” and I will have to take that faint praise as some sort of triumph!

The acrylic paints that I am using are much more watery than I expected: I like impasto and feel denied a tactile pleasure by the thin consistency of the medium. I am sure that there is something you can mix with the colour to make it spikier. I did notice in one of the books that I bought for Christmas for my ‘rival’ that it suggested that you could mix the paint with all sorts of interesting things to give different textures. One example was paint mixed with rice and the other with flour! I don’t know what effect the water content of the paints has on those hydrophilic materials. I wonder if you can use sugar; that would give an interesting look to the paint! This is another example of my running before I have even learned the definition of direction!

The next stage in my masterwork is to block out areas in the main colour and then when the thing is dry begin to work on more precise delineation. The theory is there, it is just the ineptitude which takes over when I hold a brush in my hand. Still, fun is fun and it will all last until the last of the Lidl canvases is used up!

I can always punish my presumption later by visiting MNAC and wandering through galleries with my favourite Catalan art and as a friend of MNAC it will cost me nothing. Nothing that is, if I can resist the lure of the restaurant with the staggering views over Barcelona and the gratifyingly pretentious menu!

Enough of writing there is tidying up and painting to do!

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