I finished a new painting today. In this painting, “A Skugger’s Point of View,” I wanted to render an extreme first-person point of view…in which we see the dim zone around a person’s actual visual field. The person in question is the Alan Turing character in my novel-in-progress Turing & Burroughs. He has become a mutant known as a “skugger,” and he has the ability to stretch his limbs like the cartoon character Plastic Man. He is traveling across the West with two friends, a man and a woman.

79. “A Skugger’s Point Of View”. Oil on canvas. 40″ by 30″. March, 2011. click to see larger version!

In this scene, Turing’s cohort is being attacked by secret police, one of whom bears a flame-thrower. Turing is responding by sticking his fingers into their heads, perhaps to kill them, or perhaps to convert them into skuggers as well. We can see Turing’s arms extending from the bottom edge of his visual field. Even though it’s not quite logical, I painted in his eyes as well because they make the composition better. As always, more info on my Paintings Page.

Tonight, my painter friend Vernon Head and I went to an art opening at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara. They had a show by Squeak Carnwath and a show by Stanley Goldstein.

The painting above is “Gone” by Squeak Carnwath, oil and alkyd on canvas, 2005. I liked this one a lot. Vernon and I got a chance to talk to Squeak—she lives in Oakland—a very pleasant and intelligent woman, at one time an art teacher at UC Berkeley, recently retired. She said “Gone” was to some extent in memory of seven artist friends of hers who had died, and the Etruscan style heads at the bottom could be viewed either as mourners or as the mourned.

Vernon and I were particularly impressed by Squeak’s color sense, her ability to mix such wonderfully mild and harmonious shades. In some of her paintings she goes ahead and sticks in a color wheel, just for fun. She says that color sense is her one great gift.

The other show was by Stanley Goldstein, who mostly paints domestic scenes or images from his daily life, almost like painted snapshots. He has terrific ability with color and shape. This one painting, “Francis Dancing By The TV” acrylic on panel, 1997, really jumps off the wall. Seen in the gallery, the blue of the TV is amazingly intense, in counterpoint to the rich orange-red of the quilt.

So now I’ll post the rest of my photos from Spain. Today’s pictures are from San Sebastian, a Basque-country resort town on the Spanish coast, a few miles south of the better-known resort Biarritz, in France.

San Sebastian is said to have the best tapas, or pintxos, bars in Spain. You take, or ask for, whatever you want from the platters on the bar, and somehow the waiters keep track of your tab. The stuff can be really great—with toppings like octopus, ham, anchovy, hake, shrimp, cheese, and the like. You do have to a bit wary, as the less-good places will have some tapas loaded with things like coleslaw or tuna salad. The place in this picture was in fact my favorite place, on the Calle Mayor in San Sebastian, I don’t remember the name. Totally jumping in there at 9 pm. Here’s a guide to San Sebastian tapas, but basically you just look for the places where the crowd fills the room.

A lot of the snacks include a special jamón ibérico or Iberian ham, which is very nearly unobtainable in the US. A whole ham sells for about 90 Euros, and they still have the original pig trotter intact at the top. Ideally the black Iberian pigs have fed primarily on acorns. I was kind of wondering if I might be able to smuggle one of the hams home inside my pants, taped to my leg. “Yes, I have a trotter on my knee—so?”

There’s a beautiful old square in the old part of San Sebastian, the Constitution plaza. The windows have numbers painted over them—at one time they used the square as a bull-fighting ring, and sold the window seats. The Constitution plaza is one of those lovely European hanging-out zones. People of every age sit in the cafes, chatting and relaxing. School children play soccer. Mothers with baby carriages exchange gossip.

And on Sunday, some local musicians play in one of the arcades around the plaza. I love the toddler on the bottom right, staring at the band. The tyke even danced a little. It’s amazing to me how, as soon as a child can stand, they have the idea of bouncing in rhythm and waving their arms.

San Sebastian sits on a round little bay, shielded from the most violent weather. The waves break in beautiful circular arc that runs around the whole bay. The beach is very gently sloping, which means that the tides move the waterline up and down by several hundred feet a day.

At my talk in Bilbao, I met an American artist, Lawrence S. Johnson, who lives in San Sebastian with a local woman whom he befriended while on a month-long 500-mile pilgrimage hike. Larry has read many of my books, found out about the talk via one of my tweets, and turned up. We spent a while day with Larry and his lady friend, it was great.

When we started walking, it was raining, but in a fairly mild, pleasant way. Larry and I walked on the wet sand and the ladies walked on the seaside promenade. I liked these cool layers of rock, turned at an angle.

At the end of the beaches along the bay we came to three iron sculptures, embedded into the rocks to make a piece called El Peine Del Viento, or The Comb Of The Wind, by the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida.

And then we rode a 1912 funicular train a few hundred meters to on overlooking promontory. The control room for the train was a little bit unsettling—like the lab in the original movie of Frankenstein
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Atop the promontory was a nearly inactive (as it was February) amusement park for kids, a fairly low-tech set up. I dug the entrance to the Casa Del Terror, or House Of Horror. I’ve always been very frightened of those places, and haven’t been in one since I was a kid.

I was surprised to see a fortune-telling machine modeled on a famous sculpture in Rome, the Boca de Verita, or Mouth of Truth. The story goes that if you put your hand inside the slot like mouth and say something, the stone won’t let you remove your hand if what you said wasn’t true. I actually wrote about this in my book Infinity and the Mind, years ago. My paradoxical thought was to put my hand into the mouth and say, “I will not be able to remove my hand,” getting a statement that’s true if and only if it’s false.

And in this off-the-grid kiddie park, there was my old friend the Boca, jammed in with Aladdin.

We slept in an old place called the Hotel Niza, with a nice view of the bay. On Friday night, there was a fair amount of noise from young people partying on the beach—they only partied on Friday, not on Thursday or Saturday. But on Friday they were up until four or five am.

The bay was amazing at night, with the beautiful lights reflecting off it. When we’d go out for supper at about 9 pm, we’d walk along the bay to the old town. This photo reminds me a little of a Van Gogh painting we saw at a show in San Francisco this winter.

In the mornings and again in the early evening, hundreds of people promenaded along the path by the beach. The trimmed trees look kind of like sea creatures here.

In the early morning, fanatical locals would change into their suits at a bathing-club downstairs and head into the surf.

A beautiful old carousel by the beach was decorated with paintings taken from the masterpieces of art—how European.

And then our week was over, and we made our way back home via the Serra sculpture in Bilbao.

My wife Sylvia and I just spent a week in Basque country in the north of Spain, in the towns of Bilbao and San Sebastian. I was there to give a talk for “Garum Day” as mentioned in a previous post. For today’s post I’ll run about half of my pictures, with comments. A few of the pictures are by Sylvia, mostly the ones of me.

Our hotel, the Domine, was right across from the famous Gehry-designed Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. Jeff Koons’s Puppy stands right outside the museum. Some people find this work annoying, but I think it’s cool, a definite heir to the work of Warhol. “Puppy” has quite a presence in person. The locals seem to like it, and the flowers (pansies) get replaced three times a year. There’s a certain camouflage-pattern quality to how the patches of flower colors are arranged—more thought went into the work than one might think.

So here I am with the museum itself, the metal skin is titanium, it’s awesome. No one picture really captures the thing.

When we got to Bilbao we were jetlagged, and slept till it was dark, and then we walked around the Guggenheim at night. In the back, the buttresses seem like castle ramparts.

There’s a nice old-town section of Bilbao too, of course, including a church that was at one time part of the city wall. A great rose window in the ceiling of one alcove.

This guy was playing great Spanish-style guitar in the street by the cathedral. And dig the woman hurrying by with her cell phone.

One of our big projects in Bilbao and San Sebastian was seeking out good tapas bars. They call tapas pintxos there, that’s the Basque word for these little canapé-like snacks that are piled on platters in many of the bars. The “tx” is pronounced “tsch”. The place in this photo is the Café-Bar Bilbao, in Plaza Nueva, a really pleasant square. They had good tapas in this place, and I loved the tiles on the walls. But, as any local will tell you the really great tapas is in San Sebastian.

A tricky thing about going out for meals in Spain is the restaurants and cafes mainly serve lunch from 2 to 4 in the afternoon and dinner from 9 to 11 at night. Seriously. Many restaurants aren’t even open before 9 in the evening. It’s a whole different rhythm, but with our jetlag it was a pretty good fit. The thing is, you kind of just do your sedentary evening activities (like lying around reading or cruising the web) before supper.

Bilbao has a little historical and archeological Museo Vasco (Vasco=Basque) museum with an ancient (maybe 200 BC) statue of a pig (or maybe it’s a bull…the locals call it the pig-bull). I couldn’t get into the pig-bulls courtyard to touch him, but he was beautiful as seen through the window with his green grass and the gentle shadow of a little tree beside him.

Another picture of the Guggenheim. The upper pieces of the building—what do you call them, battlements?—blend nicely with the clouds. One of the locals claimed it rains every day in Bilbao. But the sun comes out too.

Our hotel had angled windows that reflected the colors of the Guggenheim and of a big red arch over a bridge next to the Guggenheim.

Here’s the red arch at night with people walking along the river below. Gehry ran a long exhibition hall out of the museum that runs under the bridge and holds this collection of really enormous Richard Serra sculptures, a suite called “The Matter of Time.”

I’d never really liked Serra’s work before this trip—in the past it struck me as overbearing and blank. But it was very inspiring to be walking around inside these giant maze-like spirals with their interesting curvatures—some were spherical in the sense of curving the same way in all directions, some were “toroidal” in the sense of curving in two different directions, like a saddle. There’s amazing echoes inside the Serras as well.

One last photo from Bilbao, and in the next post or two, I’ll show pictures from San Sebastian. What’s this menacing image above? It’s Maman, by Louise Bourgeouis, photographed outside the Guggenheim at night. The jacked-up ISO on my Canon S90’s chip turned the black sky into blue.

And this sculpture is…Mama!?! Eeek. Shades of the spider attack scene in The Incredible Shrinking Man!