Art

Complications

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Following up from the metaphor we discussed last week, that imaginary rope with which we entangle ourselves sometimes, today I´m bringing you a graphic humour page by the great Quinocreator of Mafalda, who I already mentioned some other time.

It´s a page from the book titled Gente en su sitio (People in their place), published in 1980:

Here´s the English transcription, together with a description of the twelve frames, for those who cannot see the image: 

1) A very stressed-looking man is trying to detangle a rope he has in his hands; the rope is all tangled, full of knots everywhere. He says out loud: "Why? Why does one always have to live with some damn complication?"

2) Angrily, he continues to tug the rope in one direction and the other, trying to untie the knots...

3) ... Only to end up with the same knots as before, plus a new one that´s even bigger.

4) He gives up, letting his arms drop, and exclaims: "This is useless! I´ll never resolve it!".

5) Then he gets angry again and starts to shake the rope in his hands, shouting: "I´ll never resolve this damn complication!"

6) "I´ll nev..." Suddenly, he stops in his tracks and looks at the rope, stunned. Somehow, all the knots are already untangled!

7) "Hah!..." What a joy! He can barely believe it; he´s done it!

8) "Finally!" He thinks to himself, as he smiles with his eyes closed and his head turned upwards, towards the sky, stretching his arms, enjoying the moment.

9) Still smiling, he looks at the rope...

10) ... He shakes it a little with his hand, and his smile starts fading...

11) ... Until he´s looking serious again, staring at the rope stretching before him.

12) Suddenly, he lowers his head and starts complaining again, thinking: "Why? Why this boredom now?"

What do you think? The paradoxes of life, right? Or rather, the paradoxes of human beings. I get the impression that sometimes, when we find ourselves without any problems or complications, we actually look for them, because we´re not comfortable otherwise. When will we learn to enjoy the moment without making our own lives so complicated?

And you? In which ways are you complicating your own life? What could you do in order to simplify and enjoy the moment more?

The importance of context

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Some of the books I remember most fondly from back when I was a child were the ones about Mafalda, a compilation of comic strips from the sixties and seventies created by Quino, the great Argentinian cartoonist.

I don´t remember how old I was when I started reading those books; I do remember being curious about words and expressions in Argentinian Spanish, and not understanding some of the jokes. But I didn´t mind, I loved them anyway. I re-read them so many times that I ended up memorizing many of the strips, and years later I finally got to understand them... Quino´s sense of humour is really, really clever in my opinion, and many of the topics he explored in Mafalda´s comic strips and his other graphic humour works remain as relevant now as they were back then.

Today I´m bringing you this strip, to illustrate a topic that came up recently:

Mafalda comic strip - Mafalda and Susanita talking about understanding adults

Here´s the transcription in English: it´s a conversation between Mafalda (a girl who´s about six years old) and her friend Susanita:

- Susanita: Why on Earth do adults spend their time doing and saying things one doesn´t understand?
- Mafalda: It´s very simple, Susanita. When you arrive at the cinema and it turns out the movie has already started, do you understand it?
- Susanita: No.
- Mafalda: Well, the same happens with adults. How can we possibly understand them, if, by the time we arrived, all of them had already started!?

What do you think of this reflection? Leaving aside the joke about kids not understanding adults, the truth is that sometimes we adults don´t understand each other either. Have you ever been in a class, or a meeting at work, and felt completely clueless, as if you had arrived in the middle of the movie?

The problem is that, more often than not, there´s certain basic information missing, and it´s assumed that everybody knows it: the context has not been defined. This may seem very obvious but in reality, it´s not, and it causes more communication issues than you would imagine. Going back to the work meeting example, maybe there was a previous email conversation that didn´t include all participants, and people go straight into discussing solutions without first checking that everyone knows exactly what the problem is. In a classroom, for example, the teacher may start teaching a topic that´s completely new and different, getting straight into the detail, without first explaining what it is about, why it is important, and how it fits with all the previous learning. Both the meeting and the class will be much more productive if there´s an initial investment in explaining the context.

And in a similar way, each person also has a context: each of us has a history, a family, a culture, a set of values, personal circumstances, thoughts, emotions, etc., etc., etc. The more we know about a person´s context, the better we will understand them, and the less we will judge. That´s why I think that, in our day-to-day, we could all benefit from clarifying the context of our conversations, this way getting to understand each other much better.

But be careful not to give too many explanations! It´s not necessary to explain everything, only the essentials. You´ll avoid being told what my mother used to tell me when I rambled on: start at the end! 😀

Starry night

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I can´t say that painting is a topic that I´ve always been interested in, or that I´ve dedicated much time to it during my life, but it is true that there are certain works of art that I find especially beautiful (or interesting), and that I´m really fond of.

Among them, there are several pieces by Vincent Van Gogh.

Painting: "room in Arles", by Vincent Van Gogh
Painting: "chair", by Vincent Van Gogh

I think this is mainly thanks to a coffee shop that existed years ago in Madrid´s city centre, Van Gogh Café, which my family and I used to visit very frequently, given its lovely atmosphere,, the superb food they offered and the fact that it was located just next to my parents´ apartment. I have very good memories of going to Van Gogh´s when the girls were still little, especially with my parents at lunchtime, and sometimes with the additional company of some of my siblings, siblings in law or nephews and nieces, whoever happened to be in Madrid on those dates. And on a couple of occasions, we also had big celebrations, with the whole family gathered together 🙂

The café was of course decorated with all things Van Gogh, with copies of his best known paintings scattered all over the walls, paper placemats printed with a collection of his many self portraits, and even a reconstruction of one of his scenes, with a real table and two chairs placed next to a big front window. Unfortunately, that venue closed down a few years ago, but the simple style and the vibrant colours of Van Gogh´s paintings stayed in my memory since then.

That´s why I was so happy when I recently got to see some of his paintings at the National Gallery, in London, including the one with the sunflowers (or to be precise, one of them, as he painted several canvases with the sunflowers theme), the chair you can see above, and this landscape with clouds that I didn´t remember seeing before, and that I also found quite cool:

Pero el que se lleva la palma en mi opinión es el de la noche estrellada, a la que hasta Lego le ha hecho un homenaje, y que también es uno de los cuadros estrella de la exposición interactiva (o como la llaman oficialmente, «la experiencia inmersiva») que hemos visitado este fin de semana en Dublín:

I loved learning a bit more about the life and works of this great painter, who was gifted with very deep sensitivity and an extraordinary talent, both of which sadly came together with a great deal of suffering, as it often happens in the world or artists.

There were several of his quotes that I found really inspiring, like for example:

«Si oyes una voz dentro de ti que dice que no puedes pintar, entonces adelante, pinta,,y esa voz será silenciada.»

«Las grandes cosas no se consiguen por impulso, sino a base de ir enlazando una serie de pequeñas cosas»

«El corazón del hombre se parece mucho al mar: tiene sus tormentas, tiene sus mareas, y en sus profundidades también hay perlas.»

«¿Qué sería de la vida si no tuvéramos el coraje de intentar nada?

Y también me acordé de que hace años alguien le compuso una canción preciosa, «Vincent», aquí la tenéis con la letra en inglés y en español:

Learning from the artists

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Yesterday, taking advantage of a free day in Madrid (and running away from the heat, it also has to be said), I went to visit the Prado Museum.

I truly enjoyed the visit, totally recommend it. What I wouldn´t recommend is doing the whole museum in one single day, as I did; by the end of it my feet were hurting... For reasonable people like you all, there´s a very good audio guide with recommendations of what pieces to see, depending on whether you want your visit to last for one hour, or two, or three. I simply kept walking from room to room, going with the flow, curiously looking around. Don´t ask me how long it took me.

One thing that immediately caught my attention were some paintings that were copies of other paintings, or parts of them, sometimes showing side by side. Please note that I´m saying copies, not forgeries; the intention was not to try and make one painting pass as another. They were often made by painters as part of their training, or as a tribute, copying paintings from the great masters of their time (or a previous time), with high quality results as well.

On other occasions, the same painter made several copies with slight variations on the same theme, especially if his art was in high demand, and sold different copies to different people (back then it was not as easy as copy and paste 🙂 )

And something else that I learned is how, for certain high stakes commissions, some painters made one or more drafts in a smaller format before tackling the big canvas. This gave them a space to rehearse the structure and elements of the painting in advance, and also allowed them to show their sponsor a "sneak preview" of the result, in order to secure approval for the final order. It´s really interesting to see the evolution of the piece from the first draft all the way to the finished painting, similarly to how comics, movies, etc. are made these days.

But going back to the copied paintings: a good example of this is Rubens, who, during his stay in Italy, copied several works by Titian, including "The rape of Europa".

Original work by Titian (displayed at a Boston museum):

Copy by Rubens, displayed at the Prado:

But this is not the end of the story. Later on, here comes Velázquez, and includes a tribute to this same work in one of his paintings. Pay attention to the tapestry in the background of this scene represented in "The spinners" (also called "The fable of Arachne"), which is also displayed in the same room at the Prado museum:

I thought it was a very cool idea, a painting inside another painting 🙂

An idea of which I bumped into several other examples across the museum, like this painting by Jan Brueghel and Rubens, dedicated to "Sight" as part of a series on the five senses:

And then, the most awesome one in my opinion, this work by David Teniers the Younger, "Archduke Leopold Wilhelm van Habsburg in his art gallery in Brussels":

OMG, the amount of talent needed to paint all that...

Anyway, I really loved my visit to the Prado Museum, far beyond getting to see the typical famous paintings like "Las Meninas" (though I enjoyed those as well). I especially liked seeing how the artists learned from each other, building on the knowledge and techniques that already existed to innovate and create new ones, and this way make their own contribution to the world of art, for others to enjoy and learn in turn.

It got me thinking about how for us as well, for anything we may want to learn, there are already plenty of masters we can model and learn from (even more so in these times of Wikipedia and Youtube), so that we don´t have to "reinvent the wheel" every time, as the saying goes. And it´s also said that the best way to learn is to teach, to share what we already know, of course giving due credit to those we have learned it from.

Sharing knowledge, learning together, we all move forward.

Inspiration in the shape of a card

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If you´ve been reading this blog for a while, by now you will have probably noticed that I have a thing for inspirational quotes and phrases. I have gathered many of them over the years, in different formats: in the old times, I used to cut out newspaper and magazine clippings and keep them in a folder; nowadays I mostly take pictures of them, or copy them from the internet and paste them in a notepad in my computer or phone.

Inspiration can show up anywhere: on a blackboard at a shop or café, in a fridge magnet, in an advertisement… Even at the dentist´s office, or in a biology book from school (true story, I was so sad to lose that book).

Today I bring you four phrases in card format that I have at home (from Quotable Cards), which resonate a lot with me at this moment of my life, I hope they get to inspire you as well:

«Life isn´t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. (Unknown).»

– Oh, so I can create myself then? I can decide what to do with my life? That´s cool! But... Where do I start?

«Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you´ve imagined. – Thoreau».

– Ahhh, walking towards my dreams, that sounds lovely. Living the life that I want, at last. But wait, to achieve that, one has to move, right? And I´m sooo comfy here...

«Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. – Neale Donald Walsch.»

– Ufff, getting out of my comfort zone, that´s something else. Of course, I want to achieve my dream, but, what if it goes wrong? What if I make a mistake? What if I look like a fool? I don´t like being in a situation I can´t control... What do I do now?

«Slow down, calm down, don´t worry, don´t hurry, trust the process. – Alexandra Stoddard.»

– Ohhh, so this is part of a process then? That explains everything 🙂. To be honest, this comfort zone where I am is very comfy (as the name suggests), but it´s also a bit boring; my dream is beyond here. And every time I dare to try something new, to put a foot outside, I feel a bit lost, insecure, even scared... But I already know that if I keep going, whatever the result, for sure I will learn something, and my comfort zone will become a little bit bigger, and that will get me another bit closer to my dream.

Reminder

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Quite often it happens that, without realizing it, we set too high standards for ourselves, and then we self criticize for not reaching those standards… We let our personal saboteur (that little mental voice that keeps annoying us non-stop) take control and beat us up, not recognizing our true value. And that way, we become our own worst enemy.

For those moments, I bring you this reminder from my upstairs corridor:

Always remember, you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, smarter than you think, & twice as beautiful as you´d ever imagined.

What goes through your head as you read this line? Do you believe it? What else do you need in order to believe it? If you were reading it out loud to your friend and they didn´t believe it, what would you say to them?

What if you could be your own best friend?

Go raibh mile maith agat

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It was Saint Patrick´s day earlier this week, and all around the world there were celebrations of everything to do with Ireland and the Irish, including their very own language: Irish (or Gaelic).

I used to think that I was good at languages, but that was before I moved to Ireland and bumped into Irish… I find it really interesting as a language, but also very complicated to learn; it took me years to learn how to say something as simple as “thanks”.

Although, in fairness, saying thanks in Irish is not as straightforward as saying it in Spanish or English…

This mug was a birthday present (thanks Irene!), it literally says “a thousand thanks”. It´s one of the few things I do know how to say in Irish, together with the colours, counting from one to ten, and some of the most popular names for boys and girls, which I learned by meeting people whose names I had no idea how to pronounce 😊

Luckily, you don´t have to speak Irish in order to live in Ireland; English is more than enough for day-to-day life. Children do learn it in school from an early age, and even though it´s not going to help them to communicate with people from other countries, it will help them to preserve this country´s legacy and traditions.

Also, on top of that, learning languages in general helps to open our minds, because it forces our brain to think differently, and allows us to explore, through the use of words, other ways to see the world that are different from ours. So whatever we get to learn, be it a lot or a little, will be welcome.

For the moment, here is the message from the mug again, and let me take this opportunity to thank you for being here and reading me every week:

Go raibh mile maith agat

Like branches on a tree

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Let me show you today another one of the pictures that decorate the walls in my house:

Drawing of a tree and some text
FAMILY: like branches on a tree, we all grow in different directions… Yet our roots remain as one.

I love this picture because it joins two ideas that I find really interesting. Belonging to a family means sharing our roots: as its members, we all come from a common place, we share some history, the history our ancestors started and we get to continue.

But like branches on a tree, from that common root, each of us grows in our own way and in our own time. Some of us look more like other branches of the tree, and others, less so. Some of us grow closer together, and others, further apart. And that´s all good. Each branch searches for its own path forward, always getting nourishment, knowingly or unknowingly, from the roots and the trunk that hold them.

I guess I big part of our mission as parents is exactly this: being a solid base from which to provide our children with everything they may need, of course including physical and emotional nourishment, but also the space and freedom they require to grow and evolve following their own style, and trust in the knowledge that they will find their own way in life.

Dare to shine

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Today I got my present from the family Kris Kindle (thanks Mercedes!), and I´m really excited about it, here it is:

It´s the kind of thing I would never have bought for myself, but that I loved receiving as a present… It´s my letter! With shining lights! And I think it looks super cool on my bedroom shelf 🙂

But why do I know that I would never have bought it? Because I don’t normally like being in the spotlight, I prefer to avoid standing out… That’s been my style in most situations for as long as I can remember: going unnoticed insofar as possible. But also doing my job really well, hoping that others would notice (which of course, sometimes happened and sometimes didn’t).

Reflecting on all of this now, I realize that I’ve spent many of my years tiptoeing through life, so as to not be an inconvenience. And now that I am conscious of my way of being in this world, I have the option to keep it as it is or change it, as I see fit.

That’s why I like this metaphor of switching “my light” on, to start shining. And I remembered this quote, attributed by many to Nelson Mandela, though in reality it is from Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

What about you? Do you dare switching on your light? 😉

Another phrase up on the wall

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Continuing with the art tour around my house, let me show you another phrase that´s decorating the walls, in this case in my daughters´ room. It was a present from their cousin Isabel:

No te estoy diciendo que será fácil, te estoy diciendo que valdrá la pena / I´m not telling you it will be easy, I´m telling you it will be worth it.

“I´m not telling you it will be easy, I´m telling you it will be worth it.”

I love this phrase for two reasons: one, I really believe this is true in many situations, and two, I think the choice of words here is very very clever. Because even though in theory this is telling us that, whatever it is, is not going to be easy, given that our brains find it difficult to process the “not” bit, deep down what this is telling us is that it IS going to be easy… or at least, not that difficult.

The words that we use when speaking (and thinking) do matter, and they matter a lot. Saying that something is difficult is not the same as saying that it´s not easy: the latter is somehow a “lighter” expression than the former, and our brains find it easier to digest… In fact, the practice of using the word “not” this way is a little NLP trick that I´ll tell you more about some other time.

And for you, what is this thing that may not be easy, but will surely be worth it? You decide 🙂