Seville II

Parque Maria Luisa

Seville has another ex-exposition area which has become a lovely park near the river: Parque Maria Luisa. It still has its original pavilions, leafy walks, formal and wild gardens, snacks and souvenirs: a lovely place where you can turn a corner in a wooded area and find an amazing structure of some kind. This building, Plaza de Espana, has a small pond for boat rides and a fantastical semicircular building that appears to be occupied by government offices now. As I was drawing it, the sun became so intense I was unable to really see it clearly; not to mention the need for waterproof ink in such conditions! So, a photo instead.

cafe latte + orange

Everywhere I went, there were leafy plazas lined with cafes, with their bracing jolts of espresso, tapas, and spots to relax without ever being rushed. Perfecto! Time to download (not electronically), write, draw, plan. And just be.

Bar Hmnos Gonzales--site of first bird beshitting this trip.

All through this trip, the soundtrack was different: in the morning and evening, golondrinas (swallows)
swooped through the streets and low into open spaces. The old buildings offer them so many places to tuck their nests. They make a scree, scree plaintive sound, but the air is noisy with them as the sun rises. Then there are pigeons. They have nests in the crowns of palm trees, among other places, and in any park/garden area, their cooing suffuses the space like a cool fog, soft and low. The words of people wash over me, I often don't bother to try to translate, so it is like music, too, and the Europop that has a different sound than American pop music. Sometimes American music-- jazz standards or rock-- but also different because of this new                                                                                              context. Aretha did not evoke Detroit here.

The Alcazar Real, right next to the Cathedral, is a royal palace, in fact the royal residence in Seville, and was originally a Moorish fort, named by UNESCO a world heritage site, fine example of Mudehar architecture. OK no more factoids-- this is a fabulous and very beautiful place, and if I were king of Spain, I would spend a lot of time here. I was not thinking of it in terms of its structure but just moving from one courtyard or garden to another. The gardens were lovely, some quite formal, some more rambling; some with hyperdecorated Moorish arched colonnades, some with walls full of golondrinas in the crannies and cracks, most with the splash of moving water somewhere in the background. The walls beneath the colonnades were often paved with gorgeous tiles, often elaborate tesselated designs that turned out to be composed of one irregular shape, rotated and fitted into a swirling pattern. Some were abstractions of birds, moving water-- some were geometrical, with brilliant glazes and strong patterns. It was interesting to look at the more abstract ones finding different patterns-- what the red alone does, what the negative shapes only do, and so forth. The patterns would pop in and out of awareness with this game. Well. The first garden had formal, shaved hedges of-- pomegranate! You can see the in the picture, but no blossoms are visible here. Pale blue jasmine climbed the stone walls. Swoon... but there was more and more and more, rooms with domes of inlaid wood designs, 

So: with respect to the question of the grace of curves: is it that Fibonacci thing, the unwinding spiral that makes the magic? Is it some essential nonmathematical element, that lends grace and an essential myster and grace? With the Chinese script, which seemed irregular from a mathematical standpoint: unpindownable: does chaos theory work here? Or is that just a copout for me, like quantum theory-- beyond comprehension so it becomes a belief system, not actual knowledge. How is our perceptual machinery wired to instinctively see or hear the modulated acceleration that is at the heart of a curve? 

There was a family of mother and father, three boys under ten, and a girl of about twelve, wearing the lacy white dress of a new communicant. Father followed her with a camera, kept having her pose against a bare stone wall, and taking mugshot after mugshot; meanwhile missing many wonderful shots of the boys, or all of the kids, kids and mother and so forth capering in the garden: he kept insisting on the flavorless pictures of his daughter.

self-portrait in tiles

Agapanthus, a bergmansia with hundreds of yellow blooms, a variety of citruses, many palm trees and conifers gave shape to the gardens. Several kinds of jasmine spilled down walls. there were flowering trees I didn't recognize: a yellow flower whose petals spiraled around themselves, dripping from trees with bright, narrow leaves. Did I mention how fragrant Spain is? It makes inhaling something to notice and enjoy.

I learned something about peacocks. Behind the gorgeous fan of feathers is a row of stiff but otherwise nondescript 8" or so feathers that prop up the iridescent blue feathers.Next: Casa de Pilates &c.,