Friday, November 9, 2018

Alpenista

The workers painting the interior spaces of our building have moved into the small courtyard. We have three windows the open onto this small courtyard, but no access to it. It's too small for scaffolding, so they work hanging from ropes tied to the roof. Perhaps it's normal, or a translation issue, or someone's sense of humor, but the leaflets we get under our doors letting us know of the work schedule and telling us to keep our windows closed while they work, referred to the workers as "alpenistas" (mountain climbers). Laura and I kind of laughed about it when we read the note. However, this morning when I saw them working, I couldn't think of a better term:


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Laundry was piling up and I couldn't wait for roof access, so I did another load and set it out on the indoor drying rack. It was a large load and there was literally no room to spare on the rack:


With the fan, the heater and the sunlight, 90% of it dried by the time I went to bed.

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The weekly cultural activity led by Laura's Spanish teacher, Lucia, had us at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo(CAAC) to see an exhibit of the work of Spanish artist Alfonso Albacete.  The CAAC is in an old monastary that made ceramics. There are old chapels, school buildings and kilns interspersed across the site:


The courtyard with the ivy leaves turning red in the late fall was serene:


This was our second visit to the CAAC. We went in August, but all the exhibits had since changed. Plus, it was about 40 degrees cooler.

Here are a few of the pieces I liked. This is an interpretation of the approach to the Mediterranean coast in the south of Spain. I liked it because I recognized it almost immediately as the landscape we saw when we took a bus to Malaga in August, in spite of the fact that it is heavily abstracted:


I liked this juxtaposition of an injured soccer player being taken off the field and the lowering of Christ's body from the cross:


I just liked how expressive these simple rectangular windows were:


Finally, there's a lot of self-reference going on here. It's a painting of a painting on an easel. In the easel painting, we see an abstract painting of the room in the painting. We also see to the right, a painting of the artist in the painting:


On the way out, I took a slow motion video of one of the fountains on the grounds. Unfortunately, it's slightly out of focus, but still kind of interesting:


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After the CAAC, we rode bikes over to the grocery store. Then walked home. Dinner and a restful evening followed.