Posted: June 3

El Museo de Sorolla

Finally, I managed to get to Madrid and spend most of a day looking at paintings by Joachin Sorolla, a Spanish painter from the turn of the last century. Sorrola was a master of light and the perfect brush stroke. I learned of him from my uncle, Robert Wogrin, with whom I studied painting, but had never managed to see more than a few images of his work on the web. Last year in Chicago I saw one of his pieces, a scene at the beach that was alive with light. I wanted to see more, and took the opportunity of a meeting in Madrid of the editors of the Jesuit cultural journals (such as "Razon y Fe" which is published here) to get to the museum that has been established in the house and studio where Sorolla worked.

Sorolla became famous for his large paintings at the seaside, but his ouevre covers much more ground than that. He did portraits and landscapes in a range of techniques. He could be very "tight" in the sense of precisely defined images, like the series he did to document local costumes at the turn of the nineteenth century. But what entranced me was the looseness of his gestures in most of his work--the way one simple brush stroke with just exactly the right color conveys a detail of the image. I feel like I struggle so much to get what I want when I paint; Sorolla makes it look effortless. Fortunately, the museum showed a collection of his small sketches that he did on the spot. They show his analytical skill in seeing the essential elements of a scene and portraying it quickly. They also have a small, but very good collection of his drawings. He used gouache on brown paper to great effect. The drawings are even looser than many of the paintings.

There is not enough space here to describe everything I saw, but it made me want to go home immediately and paint something. I spent as much time as I could, staring intently, trying to learn from his work. I would like to go back after I have had the chance to see what I can do to follow his example. Meanwhile, the meeting of the editors begins this afternoon. And much of it will be in French, which I don´t remember too well. Of course, I am also discovering that Italian has done major damage to my ability to speak Spanish. Italian words keep coming out when I open my mouth; back at the Curia in Rome, the opposite happens. It is some curious sort of perverse tendency within my mind. I wish I were a better linguist, but even more, I wish I were a better painter. And I am working at that.