Most of the blog for the last full week of March consists of various art-related activities, mostly in the context of the WeArt club at our office, but also the choir in which my wife sings.
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But I start with a mundane photo from my kitchen. This is what real tomatoes look like, not from the supermarket but from an outdoor market, straight from the farm. One of the joys of living in Spain is the variety and quality of the fruit and vegetables we get here:
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My wife’s birthday is March 28th, so a couple of days before I visited the Corte Inglés department store to look for a present. There is also an “Espacio Cultural” which hosts various art exhibitions. This time I stumbled on an exhibition of works by local female artists:
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Now on to the WeArt activities. One of them consists of a series of lunchtime talks called “My Favourite Artist”, during which one of us presents the work of an artist to the audience (I did it a few months ago with a talk about Ted Grant). This time, my Finnish colleague Kari presented the work of the Finnish-Swedish painter Helene Schjerfbeck, an interesting person who produced remarkable works:
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I use film a lot more now, and so I also brought my Olympus OM4T, loaded with Fuji Acros film, to the talk. Here is Kari again, developed in D76:
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Kari’s presentation:
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Carmen listening, again on Fuji Acros:
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Same photo as the preceding one, but cropped according to a suggestion from a member of Leica Users Group, Jayanand. I like his suggestion:
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On Wednesday we had another WeArt event at the office, a lunchtime drawing workshop put on by my colleague Carmen, a talented painter. She had prepared a series of exercises for the participants, and here she is explaining one of them:
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In this exercise, the objects on the table are covered, and people are supposed to draw them from memory:
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Véronique, concentrated:
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My Swedish colleague Kaisa in action:
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Carmen has given the signal to stop and uncovers the objects:
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Then the drawings are commented on and discussed:
More about the drawing workshop can be seen here.
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On Thursday evening, I participated in yet another WeArt activity, the book club. This follows the usual concept; a book is chosen for everyone to read, and then once a month we meet to discuss the book. This time the venue was a bookshop/café in the centre called Pynchon, a wonderful cultural oasis:
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The book we discussed that evening was the novel The Year of the Hare by Finnish writer Arto Paasilinna. What was really wonderful was to hear the different perspectives and reactions:
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The café at Pynchon has some quirky decorations. I loved the place, despite the limited beer selection:
More from the book evening can be seen here.
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On Friday, yet another lunchtime activity, the weekly rehearsal of the choir, led by an American woman called Janet. It was quite intense, and I really enjoyed being a fly on the wall. As I told the singers, it was a great event to photograph because they were noisy, so the shutter sound did not bother them, and they made lots of funny faces while singing:
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The gallery of the rehearsal is here.
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Staying with the singing theme, my wife has for many years been a member of the parents’ choir of the European School of Alicante. Like many of the other members of the choir, she is no longer a parent of a pupil at the school (our daughter graduated 10 years ago), but no matter. On Friday evening they had a concert at the local church in El Campello, the suburb of Alicante where we live:
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The choir in action; my wife is in the first row, second from the right:
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I finish with two more dogs from the supermarket vestibule, first one of the usual small ones:
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And a slightly rarer, larger dog, a retired greyhound:
