Barcelona 3

My last day in Barcelona was spent at the Fondacion Joan Miro. I was never a huge fan of Miro, but after spending a few hours immersed in his work and personality, I am a willing convert! As the Fondacion is on Montjuic and we took the funicular there, our first stop was the café to get our bearings. In the café several of Miro's large ceramic cones were on view and oversaw our snack. The sense of playfulness in Miro's work was immediate and welcome.

Although we could not enter this courtyard from the Fondacion, we could view the colourful piece from a variety of places.

The Fondacion also held a number of works by artists who were involved in Miro's life. I was particularly impressed by Alexander Calder's "Mercury Fountain".

The fountain was safely behind glass, but it was a pleasure to view the movement of the mercury, slower, more luminous, and more deadly than water.

The architecture of the Fondacion not only showed off the artwork of Miro, but the surrounding city itself.

The view from Montjuic is exquisite, and one can only gaze with this sculpture fountain on the terrace at beautiful Barcelona below.

I especially loved this expressionist triptych, which to me was so different from any Miro work with which I was familiar.

I did not know that Miro was experimenting with materials and meaning through attacking the canvas and exposing the structure. There was film footage of Miro working on this and other works in the series (i.e, aggressively mutilating and burning painted canvases) available for viewing on another floor of the Fondacion. I found this stunning!

There was a huge, colourful woven piece that could be viewed from both downstairs and from a second floor balcony. I was delighted to see that it was a true collaboration, signatures of Miro and Royo both appeared on the enormous tapestry.

One large gallery had a variety of bronzes created from found objects,

colourful monumental pieces and paintings.

There is a rooftop terrace that allows plenty of space for individual works

and their form and colour seems to belong in the sunshine. I highly recommend a visit to the Fondacion Joan Miro to anyone. It is a beautiful museum and the colourful, experimental work of this master is invigorating.

Feeling woolly!

I am happily overloaded with bags of wool! I have loads of Cass Art bag-for-life bags (Cass Art is a great art supply chain in the UK that I visit every time I am in London) and they are great for holding skeins of wool and then hung from the end of the banister in the stairwell...

Though it is coming along slowly (still having pains in my wrist if I do too much at once) I am happy with the way my African Flower blanket is coming along. I realised that since I was going to introduce some new colours (wine/maroon, grey, sarasota orange, emerald green) I had to make some more flowers using those colours before continuing crocheting the flowers to the blanket. 

A closeup of some of the flowers I am working on.

I am also sorting the flowers according to their outside colour. The overall design of my blanket is that the petals are a specific red (it's a poppy-cadmium colour) and the joining colour is cream, but all the inner and outer colours are not repeated (so colours with the same outer colour never have the same inner colour and vice versa).

I have also started another blanket. The "Mile-a-Minute" blanket pattern uses three colours to create oblongs which are then sewn together. My main problem is trying to keep track of counting numbers as the pattern starts with chaining 206! So I have count that about six times...