DryStoneGarden

The day before Chillida Leku, I went to the Jorge Oteiza Museum in Pamplona. Oteiza was a mid-century Basque sculptor. He was friends with Chillida and other modernists, and his work overlaps with them and was influential, though I don’t really know if he’s well-known these days or not. He was an ideas guy, a lot of his stuff is interesting, and some of it is almost good, but almost all of his ideas seem to have been developed into better sculptures by other artists. The museum paired well with a visit to Chillida Leku the next day, though I don’t think Oteiza does well by the comparison. Chillida’s sculptures are much much better.

Oteiza started with figurative work and did pretty well with it. The works are pretty good but noticeably derivative, almost every one can be identified as a Giacometti or a Henry Moore or a Brancusi, etc… He seems to have realized that, because he gave up on figurative work and only did abstract work for a while, and then eventually he gave up on that too. I’m not sure when he got the idea of turning his house into a museum, but after he died they built a modern concrete structure around the farmhouse where he had lived. The building is — like the sculptures — interesting and almost good, with some odd details such as windows that only go up to your waist. Read the rest of this entry »

A bonus from my visit to Chillida Leku was that the entrance sports a newish planting by Piet Oudolf. It immediately caught my eye as the first interesting planting I had seen in Spain, and I was thinking, well well well, who did this, it looks like an Oudolf planting. And of course it was an Oudolf planting, his style is unmistakable at this point. The planting beds gave him a bit less space to work with than the gardens I saw in the Netherlands — Vlinderhof, Singer Laren, and Rotterdam — but it had that same loose meadowy feel, and it was far and away the best planting I saw in Spain.

I think bloom color is usually not his first consideration, but the pink in the Echinacia, Stachys (I think?) and Filapendula seem clearly chosen to match the pink granite sculptures.

It’s a nice compliment to the sculptures. He has now done about a half dozen plantings at museums — Chillida Leku is owned by Hauser and Wirth who previously hired him for Durslade –which makes it verge on a specialty of his. This planting isn’t really integrated with the sculptures the way his planting is at Singer Laren and it doesn’t really contrast with his non-museum ones, but I wonder if there is anyone else who has done as many museum plantings as Oudolf. I can think of landscape architects who designed a few museum gardens in their careers, and maybe there is an analogue with the Zen or Japanese-style gardens that have been added to museums over the years, but this number of ornamental plantings seems pretty unique.

In Spain I visited Chillida Leku, the museum Eduardo Chillida developed to display his work. It’s great, a wonderful sculpture garden around a 16th century farmhouse and one of the best single-artist museum’s I’ve been to. Chillida is most famous for his work in steel, but he also did a lot of work in stone. The steel sculptures are great, but I’m mostly going to post photos of the stone and the farmhouse. Read the rest of this entry »

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This is my first blog post in a couple of years. I’ve spent the Covid years either working or hunkered down, and haven’t really felt motivated. This summer, though, I took my first significant trip in three years, riding a bicycle for six weeks in Portugal and Spain, and I got some of my blogging mojo back; Spain and Portugal are absolutely filled with subjects right in the drystonegarden wheelhouse. I expect to do at least a half dozen posts before my mojo runs out, and maybe I’ll keep going after that.
To start with, these are my drawings from the trip, almost one per day, loosely following my progress from Lisbon up through the interior of Portugal, then through the northern interior of Spain to Pamplona, then along Spain’s north coast loosely following the Camino de Santiago Norte to Santiago de Compostela, and then back down to Lisbon. It was a great trip, my third bike trip in Europe, and I can’t wait until my next one.
Read the rest of this entry »

So where were the spiders while the fly tried to break our balls? — Mike Pence David Bowie

Last summer I saw a collection of Louise Bourgeois’s spider sculptures in the gardens at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I’d seen them before, indoors at the MOMA in San Francisco, but I liked them even better when I saw them outdoors set against the Rijskmuseum’s formal brick building and gardens. And I appreciate them even more now after drawing them; they’re quite varied, each one looks different from every angle, and the context around them can create a lot of interesting effects.

This one reminds me of a tree as much as a spider, as if Bourgeois or her fabricator had been snorkeling in a mangrove swamp.

But most of them have a strong metal spider vibe. H. R. Giger with a little bit of Tolkien thrown in, the Hobbit spiders rather than the scarier Lord of the Rings one.

Her largest and most famous spider is called ‘Maman’, which means ‘Mother’. It wasn’t at the Rijksmuseum; I haven’t seen it in person, but I’m a sucker for these kinds of installation videos with cranes and cherry pickers and shots of the lug bolts holding it all together. I’ve seen videos with her talking about the symbolism and ideation of it all, but I think underneath it all she just realized that big metal spiders would look cool. Very very cool.