Friday, April 27, 2012
Vienna
Vienna
The day before leaving, Paul helped us get train tickets to go to Vienna at the Prague train station. I was a little sad to leave Prague. In fact, I had been a little sad all along, for no good reason. This trip brought memories of the past and a sort of clash with the present. I think I was decompressing from all the work and anxiety previous to leaving. I think I was also realizing that I first came to Europe in 1993, and it has been almost 20 years since that time. Nothing is the same, I am not the same, and leaving the comfort of my studio and home, where I hardly ever look in the mirror, was, let’s say, illuminating in disturbing ways. Leaving our son at home with his grandma was also challenging, although he should be o.k. and plenty of people offered to be on the lookout. If he doesn’t do his homework, so be it.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Prague
Before leaving New York, I tried to learn about the city that I was about to encounter, but every time I got distracted by email and the thousand things to do before leaving. I’ve always been the same, a traveler only upon arrival time. And then I throw myself into the new place with hunger and craving.
Prague is a beautiful city, and as soon as you see it from the plane, you know there is much to crave for in it. It spreads out from a center, spiraling around itself with its red roofs and white walls. Once you descend, it is no longer white, but its facades are painted in the pastel colors of the Baroque, Rococo and Art Nouveau. Inside, the medieval arches, fragments of frescos and arches surprise you and remind you that the true heart of this is a medieval one. Prague welcomes you with its ancient melodies, which it offers from the top of its towers.
Our friend Paul, the man who invited me to bring my art here, picked us up at the airport. He then drove us around the old parts of the city and showed us the most important sights, but after 8 hours of overnight travel, I was not taking in much. Still the beauty and the age of the city came across clearly.
He dropped us at the hotel for a few hours before going to hang the paintings at the Prague Congress Centre. He had gotten us two vouchers for hotels, and from the website for the first one, it seemed to be grand. The lobby was not extremely impressive, but once we opened the door to our room, we were amazed. “We have upgraded you to the executive suite,” the man had said, and I had replied thank you without quite understanding what that meant. What it meant was a one bedroom apartment, nicely decorated and full of little luxuries like a button to warm the floor while you are looking at yourself in the mirror, and a coffeemaker in which you insert little cups, I think it is called Nespresso, that makes the most wonderful espresso coffee I have ever tasted.
Paul picked us up at 4:00 sharp so we could go and hang the paintings. Daniel and Hana awaited us and had everything ready. They said that in a few days there would be a congress of medicine in the center, heart medicine. Well, the Sacred Heart of the Earth would be perfect! Apparently 2,000 people would attend this congress, so somebody would see the art.
The show looks good, although I have no way of knowing how people react to it. I didn’t think of leaving a book for comments, which anyway would have been difficult to leave there as there are no tables in the space. But Hana had seen the blog and liked the paintings and was excited about the work being there, lightening up the space of the huge soviet style structure built at the end of the communist era. A friend of a friend visited, a Cuban lady who is married to a Czech man and lives here in Prague. I hope to meet her next week.
After this, we took the Prague metro for the first time. The Metro is nice. We felt like we were in New York and could be free to travel anywhere without any problem. It follows the same principles as any other metro in the world and that made me feel very comforted. But we didn’t use it a lot, because in Prague, you can walk everywhere.
Juan (husband) and I walked so much in this city, we ended up semi-dead each day. The beauty of getting lost in a city is something that appeals to us both, and most of the time we just guided ourselves by whatever lured us in any direction. Once day I wanted to go to a museum, and attempted to use the map. Because by compass got so crazy in Prague, I would always walk in the wrong direction. We arrived on a working class neighborhood with Chinese restaurants and cheap stores and 9 euro per day pensions. It seemed like we were back in our neighborhood in New York, only the color of people had changed and there were more hills. We walked and walked, until we realized that we almost had gone beyond the borders of the tourist map. So we patiently retraced our steps and after 3 hours of walking on cobble stones, we got to the museum we were looking for, which turned out to be closed. After that, we were ready for anything in Prague!
Walking around and around day and night on stones will kill your feet, so if you ever go to Prague, bring hiking shoes or at least sneakers, which I did not. Still every new day I was ready to get lost again, and in this way take in the atmosphere of this place.
The museum I wanted to visit was worth the two trips. I had never seen such brilliant Medieval artworks, and so many beautiful Medieval paintings of the Virgin Mary all in one place. I was in search of a specific one, an icon I want to write about, and soon found it. It was supposed to have been painted by St. Luke, and miraculous, but now is part of this museum’s collection. It reminded me of a figure of a phallic god in the temple of Luxor in Egypt, that people still visit and secretly rub to ask for miracles. Objects of faith only become art when their worshipers die, or they might simply transform and continue to give out miracles to people like me, standing between faith and logic, wanting faith above all and giving in to logic most of the time. Still, I have experienced the miracle of an artwork many times, and know what a pilgrim feels when the object finally reveals itself in all its glory. I offered a prayer to this virgin so that her true essence might not disappear.
Another day, Paul invited us to join his family for dinner. Our friends live in a part of town that would be the equivalent of living in Long Island or a far away place in Queens. They live in a house, in a quiet neighborhood away from the city, but still part of Prague. On the way we saw Communist era buildings where people live closer to the metro.
Lenka, Paul’s wife, cooked a traditional meal for us. It was composed of beef covered in sauce with a lemon slice, berry marmalade and whipped cream on top, with bread dumplings on the side. I had the same dish on the first day we arrived at one of the restaurants in Old Town, but this was heavenly compared to the restaurant’s version. It is a very difficult meal to prepare, and it took a couple of days. It was wonderful! The meal began with a traditional liquor, and culminated with some handmade pastries that only grandmothers cook these days. Paul’s daughter, Tereza, even put them on Facebook for her friends to see. At this meal we also met Paul’s son, Pavel, who recently became a lawyer and is doing the first part of his practice. It was a great gift to be able to have this experience with Paul’s family, and we enjoyed every single moment of it.
Our first hotel was very close to “the most beautiful square in Europe” as our friend Paul described it. It only revealed its true splendor a few days after we arrived, when all the Easter decorations and vendor stations came down and the space opened wide and free. Around you can see all the eras, from Medieval to present, in good harmony. You can see the Astronomical Clock, which is the oldest clock of its kind in Europe, a great cathedral, all sorts of shops, horses and carriages, stores, and my favorite: Kafka Bookstore.
I was amazed by the number of bookstores in Prague, and even though most books were in Czech, I still went in just to feel inside. In NYC bookstores are close to gone, except for B & N, and a few independent ones that might disappear any moment. Most of the Spanish bookstores are gone and that is always very sad to me. But here they are alive and well and beautiful. Even if I cannot read anything in them!
There are also plenty of churches, which have an additional function, which in some cases is their only function: they are concert halls. There is also the Spanish Synagogue, which is breathtakingly beautiful, but I was unable to visit (yet… I will be back in a few days…)
My original feeling was to be in Prague for the entire time and really get to know the city, but I let myself be convinced to visit other cities as well. I don’t know if I will regret this, but for now, I will not complain. I do feel that it is a good idea to spend a whole month in a city and get to know it as much as possible instead of hopping around and seeing tourist sites. But sometimes I’ve got to adapt to how normal people see things.
But this does not mean we didn’t get to do very special things that only the locals do! Thursday night was the “beer tour”. Paul had said that we would go on tour through some hidden, locals’ pubs, and see what goes on there. We met at the Prague Congress Centre, and from there we went to the Mala Strana, of “Lesser City” which I think is a bad translation of “Smaller City”. To me, it is the most beautiful part of Prague and also where the Prague Castle is located. This is where the monarchs lived throughout the ages until the Hapsburgs. We had visited it before going with Paul to the pubs, so this time we concentrated on the most important things to do in Prague: eating and drinking.
In the first pub, which only locals know because it is very old and hidden, we drank beer and ate pork chops. It is full of old men talking and drinking and smoking. The Czech beer is the best because it does not make me too drunk and is the perfect complimentary drink for pork. In the next pub we drank beer and ate free hard pretzels, and in the last pub we ate some horrendously-looking, but quite edible sausage, and what they call “beer cheese,” which is a very strong cheese that you get to mash with beer, butter and mustard. Both Juan and I gave up on that one! But otherwise I have given in to all the sinful delights of Prague.
Eating is what we have done the most besides walking. I ate a pork shoulder held on a metal rod, like a mini roasted pork or barbeque chicken. That was fun, delicious and an exaggeration that made me decide to stop the madness. But the next day we went to a restaurant we had spied in the Jewish quarter the day we found the Julio Cortazar house that is now a pub. The restaurant we saw close to it seemed promising: a series of brick rooms in a basement, lighted by candles. We went to the pub first, called Blue House, that Monday when we couldn’t go in the museum. I said, well, since we could not do anything today, let’s have a beer. Juan remembered the “Blue House” and we managed to find it. It was funny to find guacamole, burritos, South American décor and Dominican bachata music playing in Spanish in the former house of Julio Cortazar in the Czech Republic. We ordered chips with guacamole to go with the Czech beer, but if you ever go, skip the chips and drink the beer, unless you are really hungry and will eat anything to survive…
Instead, wait a few hours, be super hungry and go to Cartouche. That’s the restaurant with bricks and candles. You go in and there’s a hearth and on a grill they will cook your piece of meat. I ordered roasted duck with vegetable dumplings. I thought I would get a piece of duck French style, but… I got a whole duck cut in half in a giant metal dish. I should have passed on the dumplings, though, because “dumplings” here means a soft piece of bread that might have vegetables inside. I’m not a fan. But this restaurant knew me well enough to place some warm bread on the table, and I finally found a nice, crispy whole wheat bread that was better than any bread I had eaten here so far. The duck was delicious, and I had to eat more than it’s decent. But I’m on vacation...
There were, of course, many more things we did, but these are the highlights. I wish I could place photos in between these paragraphs but I left the cable for the camera in NYC. Right now I am writing from the train that takes us to Vienna. We are passing through forests and creeks, farms, mountains. It is not so different from traveling from New York to Pennsylvania by car, but the houses and structures are certainly more picturesque and there are more of them. And there are more people. In this country, people still value people a great deal. You can feel it in the bars, on the streets, in the groups of teens roaming the streets together and all of a sudden starting to sing some Czech song. The feeling of this country is the feeling of people having fun, enjoying what life and youth have to offer, here and now.
Our next stop is Vienna, the Imperial City. I have no idea what we will see there, because, like Prague, I had no time to look too much into it. But I kind of like to be lost in a great city, and I look forward to whatever awaits us next.
Prague is a beautiful city, and as soon as you see it from the plane, you know there is much to crave for in it. It spreads out from a center, spiraling around itself with its red roofs and white walls. Once you descend, it is no longer white, but its facades are painted in the pastel colors of the Baroque, Rococo and Art Nouveau. Inside, the medieval arches, fragments of frescos and arches surprise you and remind you that the true heart of this is a medieval one. Prague welcomes you with its ancient melodies, which it offers from the top of its towers.
Our friend Paul, the man who invited me to bring my art here, picked us up at the airport. He then drove us around the old parts of the city and showed us the most important sights, but after 8 hours of overnight travel, I was not taking in much. Still the beauty and the age of the city came across clearly.
He dropped us at the hotel for a few hours before going to hang the paintings at the Prague Congress Centre. He had gotten us two vouchers for hotels, and from the website for the first one, it seemed to be grand. The lobby was not extremely impressive, but once we opened the door to our room, we were amazed. “We have upgraded you to the executive suite,” the man had said, and I had replied thank you without quite understanding what that meant. What it meant was a one bedroom apartment, nicely decorated and full of little luxuries like a button to warm the floor while you are looking at yourself in the mirror, and a coffeemaker in which you insert little cups, I think it is called Nespresso, that makes the most wonderful espresso coffee I have ever tasted.
Paul picked us up at 4:00 sharp so we could go and hang the paintings. Daniel and Hana awaited us and had everything ready. They said that in a few days there would be a congress of medicine in the center, heart medicine. Well, the Sacred Heart of the Earth would be perfect! Apparently 2,000 people would attend this congress, so somebody would see the art.
The show looks good, although I have no way of knowing how people react to it. I didn’t think of leaving a book for comments, which anyway would have been difficult to leave there as there are no tables in the space. But Hana had seen the blog and liked the paintings and was excited about the work being there, lightening up the space of the huge soviet style structure built at the end of the communist era. A friend of a friend visited, a Cuban lady who is married to a Czech man and lives here in Prague. I hope to meet her next week.
After this, we took the Prague metro for the first time. The Metro is nice. We felt like we were in New York and could be free to travel anywhere without any problem. It follows the same principles as any other metro in the world and that made me feel very comforted. But we didn’t use it a lot, because in Prague, you can walk everywhere.
Juan (husband) and I walked so much in this city, we ended up semi-dead each day. The beauty of getting lost in a city is something that appeals to us both, and most of the time we just guided ourselves by whatever lured us in any direction. Once day I wanted to go to a museum, and attempted to use the map. Because by compass got so crazy in Prague, I would always walk in the wrong direction. We arrived on a working class neighborhood with Chinese restaurants and cheap stores and 9 euro per day pensions. It seemed like we were back in our neighborhood in New York, only the color of people had changed and there were more hills. We walked and walked, until we realized that we almost had gone beyond the borders of the tourist map. So we patiently retraced our steps and after 3 hours of walking on cobble stones, we got to the museum we were looking for, which turned out to be closed. After that, we were ready for anything in Prague!
Walking around and around day and night on stones will kill your feet, so if you ever go to Prague, bring hiking shoes or at least sneakers, which I did not. Still every new day I was ready to get lost again, and in this way take in the atmosphere of this place.
The museum I wanted to visit was worth the two trips. I had never seen such brilliant Medieval artworks, and so many beautiful Medieval paintings of the Virgin Mary all in one place. I was in search of a specific one, an icon I want to write about, and soon found it. It was supposed to have been painted by St. Luke, and miraculous, but now is part of this museum’s collection. It reminded me of a figure of a phallic god in the temple of Luxor in Egypt, that people still visit and secretly rub to ask for miracles. Objects of faith only become art when their worshipers die, or they might simply transform and continue to give out miracles to people like me, standing between faith and logic, wanting faith above all and giving in to logic most of the time. Still, I have experienced the miracle of an artwork many times, and know what a pilgrim feels when the object finally reveals itself in all its glory. I offered a prayer to this virgin so that her true essence might not disappear.
Another day, Paul invited us to join his family for dinner. Our friends live in a part of town that would be the equivalent of living in Long Island or a far away place in Queens. They live in a house, in a quiet neighborhood away from the city, but still part of Prague. On the way we saw Communist era buildings where people live closer to the metro.
Lenka, Paul’s wife, cooked a traditional meal for us. It was composed of beef covered in sauce with a lemon slice, berry marmalade and whipped cream on top, with bread dumplings on the side. I had the same dish on the first day we arrived at one of the restaurants in Old Town, but this was heavenly compared to the restaurant’s version. It is a very difficult meal to prepare, and it took a couple of days. It was wonderful! The meal began with a traditional liquor, and culminated with some handmade pastries that only grandmothers cook these days. Paul’s daughter, Tereza, even put them on Facebook for her friends to see. At this meal we also met Paul’s son, Pavel, who recently became a lawyer and is doing the first part of his practice. It was a great gift to be able to have this experience with Paul’s family, and we enjoyed every single moment of it.
Our first hotel was very close to “the most beautiful square in Europe” as our friend Paul described it. It only revealed its true splendor a few days after we arrived, when all the Easter decorations and vendor stations came down and the space opened wide and free. Around you can see all the eras, from Medieval to present, in good harmony. You can see the Astronomical Clock, which is the oldest clock of its kind in Europe, a great cathedral, all sorts of shops, horses and carriages, stores, and my favorite: Kafka Bookstore.
I was amazed by the number of bookstores in Prague, and even though most books were in Czech, I still went in just to feel inside. In NYC bookstores are close to gone, except for B & N, and a few independent ones that might disappear any moment. Most of the Spanish bookstores are gone and that is always very sad to me. But here they are alive and well and beautiful. Even if I cannot read anything in them!
There are also plenty of churches, which have an additional function, which in some cases is their only function: they are concert halls. There is also the Spanish Synagogue, which is breathtakingly beautiful, but I was unable to visit (yet… I will be back in a few days…)
My original feeling was to be in Prague for the entire time and really get to know the city, but I let myself be convinced to visit other cities as well. I don’t know if I will regret this, but for now, I will not complain. I do feel that it is a good idea to spend a whole month in a city and get to know it as much as possible instead of hopping around and seeing tourist sites. But sometimes I’ve got to adapt to how normal people see things.
But this does not mean we didn’t get to do very special things that only the locals do! Thursday night was the “beer tour”. Paul had said that we would go on tour through some hidden, locals’ pubs, and see what goes on there. We met at the Prague Congress Centre, and from there we went to the Mala Strana, of “Lesser City” which I think is a bad translation of “Smaller City”. To me, it is the most beautiful part of Prague and also where the Prague Castle is located. This is where the monarchs lived throughout the ages until the Hapsburgs. We had visited it before going with Paul to the pubs, so this time we concentrated on the most important things to do in Prague: eating and drinking.
In the first pub, which only locals know because it is very old and hidden, we drank beer and ate pork chops. It is full of old men talking and drinking and smoking. The Czech beer is the best because it does not make me too drunk and is the perfect complimentary drink for pork. In the next pub we drank beer and ate free hard pretzels, and in the last pub we ate some horrendously-looking, but quite edible sausage, and what they call “beer cheese,” which is a very strong cheese that you get to mash with beer, butter and mustard. Both Juan and I gave up on that one! But otherwise I have given in to all the sinful delights of Prague.
Eating is what we have done the most besides walking. I ate a pork shoulder held on a metal rod, like a mini roasted pork or barbeque chicken. That was fun, delicious and an exaggeration that made me decide to stop the madness. But the next day we went to a restaurant we had spied in the Jewish quarter the day we found the Julio Cortazar house that is now a pub. The restaurant we saw close to it seemed promising: a series of brick rooms in a basement, lighted by candles. We went to the pub first, called Blue House, that Monday when we couldn’t go in the museum. I said, well, since we could not do anything today, let’s have a beer. Juan remembered the “Blue House” and we managed to find it. It was funny to find guacamole, burritos, South American décor and Dominican bachata music playing in Spanish in the former house of Julio Cortazar in the Czech Republic. We ordered chips with guacamole to go with the Czech beer, but if you ever go, skip the chips and drink the beer, unless you are really hungry and will eat anything to survive…
Instead, wait a few hours, be super hungry and go to Cartouche. That’s the restaurant with bricks and candles. You go in and there’s a hearth and on a grill they will cook your piece of meat. I ordered roasted duck with vegetable dumplings. I thought I would get a piece of duck French style, but… I got a whole duck cut in half in a giant metal dish. I should have passed on the dumplings, though, because “dumplings” here means a soft piece of bread that might have vegetables inside. I’m not a fan. But this restaurant knew me well enough to place some warm bread on the table, and I finally found a nice, crispy whole wheat bread that was better than any bread I had eaten here so far. The duck was delicious, and I had to eat more than it’s decent. But I’m on vacation...
There were, of course, many more things we did, but these are the highlights. I wish I could place photos in between these paragraphs but I left the cable for the camera in NYC. Right now I am writing from the train that takes us to Vienna. We are passing through forests and creeks, farms, mountains. It is not so different from traveling from New York to Pennsylvania by car, but the houses and structures are certainly more picturesque and there are more of them. And there are more people. In this country, people still value people a great deal. You can feel it in the bars, on the streets, in the groups of teens roaming the streets together and all of a sudden starting to sing some Czech song. The feeling of this country is the feeling of people having fun, enjoying what life and youth have to offer, here and now.
Our next stop is Vienna, the Imperial City. I have no idea what we will see there, because, like Prague, I had no time to look too much into it. But I kind of like to be lost in a great city, and I look forward to whatever awaits us next.
Sunday, April 01, 2012
How do you continue to create?
 |
| Landscape of Peace by Tanya Torres |
There is only one way that I have found to continue, without those famous dry spells that are so easy to get. I sit down and start.
And I make sure that I always have something already started. That way, there's no need to think. I start, and my brain starts, too.
It is the same for a painting as for a piece of writing. Although writing is less risky. With a painting, you don't want to ruin materials and add to Mother Earth's sorrows and your own, so it is better to start on paper or even in Photoshop. But be careful, you don't want to end up with a beautiful drawing on highly acidic paper (yes, its has happened...) so splurge a little and have some good paper available. I cut a sheet of BFK Rives in 8 pieces and use them on both sides, if necessary (If I mess up!)
It helps to pray, or at least trust that there are enough ideas and love in the Universe for you to get some original ones at any given time. Or create your own Zafacón de las ideas, the Recycling Bin of Ideas, where you can throw your thoughts and ideas after an engaging conversation, a visit to the museum, a surf through the Internet. When you need a last resource, there it will be.
I also do easy things when something is so difficult I can't or don't know how to deal with it. When I am procrastinating, I paint tiles. That gives me time to organize my thoughts, plan and recoup. Or I write in this blog. I procrastinate a lot, so I paint a lot of tiles and sell all of them. A profitable procrastination exercise.
Most of all, I trust that I can be of use to Divine Love through my work and passion, and that I will be given what I need to continue. That is, ultimately, what means the most to me. Once in a while a get an email telling me of someones soul healing through an image of one of my paintings. And then I know what this is all about, and how can I stop?
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