SCHILLING
c/Ferran, 23
EL PORTALÓN
c/Banys Nous, 20
bar sketches in
barcelona...
on a wandersome day in February 2010...
I missed the big Gaudi church but I wandered the streets and bars on my first visit to what I'd thought was a town like Nice but which from the 'plane I realised is an enormous city in which lurks the town we are looking for...
The bars are still places where you can smoke, but certainly fewer do so than erstwhile — and the home page web site of the 4 Gats even has a graphics gizmo that pictures a waft of cigar smoke from the crowd (www.4gats.com) — so that the effect is rather happy and free, unfettered in a way much harder to find in Florence or Paris. But little new can be said about the place. I spent a day circling & visiting & revisiting the Picasso museum and the 4 Gats and so on, and here are some sketches from that passage.
All are on paper, 19 x 24.5 cms, cut for an odd-sized Italian ring-binder; the brush & ink are on English 300 gsm watercolour paper and done with a Japanese reservoir brush using ink made in Leipzig, while the line fantasies of the 4 Gats are on 120 gsm ivory paper using the waiter's pen.
The 4 Gats (literally, 'four cats') is known for the teenage Picasso's menu card and as the venue of more or less his first exhibition, but not everyone knows why the place is so called: it comes from an expression meaning some gist we'd translate along the lines of 'odds & sods' or 'the usual suspects', for instance in answer to the question, "Oh, so who was there last night?"
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SCHILLING c/Ferran, 23 |
EL PORTALÓN c/Banys Nous, 20 |
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4 GATS
c/Montsió, 3bis
