First, You Put an Airship on the Cover

Science Fiction was simple when I was younger, ranging from "space opera" (cowboys and Indians plots adapted to interplanetary settings) to more genteel, literary "speculative fiction." And when I dropped by the Sci-Fi section of a bookstore, the displayed books dealt pretty much with the spectrum just noted.

Alas (as Sci-Fi writer Jerry Pournelle would preface many a remark), these days matters are a lot messier. It seems that something called Fantasy invaded and then merged with the Sci-Fi book displays. More recently, books about vampires have been added to the mix. The result for me is that I have to do a good deal of serious screening to distill a selection of books dealing with blasters, energy shields and bug-eyed monsters.

That's not all! Over the last couple of decades, a new genre has materialized: steampunk.

This is not a bad thing because I'm prone to like it thanks to my interest in history and technology. My problem is finding steampunk novels that are actually pretty good (I keep wasting money on stuff I discard in boredom or disgust after 40 or 50 pages).

A further confession: What hooks me into buying some of those substandard novels is an image of an airship on the book's cover. Apparently, there are enough folks out there who are fascinated by airships that such covers pop up with alarming regularity. Here are some examples.

The last three illustrations are by Stephan Martiniere, the final two for Jay Lake's "Escapement" and L. Neil Smith's "The American Zone."


Real-world airships come in three structural flavors. At one extreme are those where the main "hull" is the gasbag itself, what we commonly call a "blimp." A more technical name is "non-rigid airship" where rigidity refers to its structure. Opposing this are "rigid airships" that traditionally have a light aluminum frame structure within which is a set of large gasbags. There is an intermediate type called "semi-rigid."

Another term for rigid airships is "dirigible," but sometimes this is sloppily applied to blimps as well. Yet another term is "Zeppelin," but that really should be reserved for German-built dirigibles, the name coming from their great proponent Count (Graf) Zeppelin.

German dirigible LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin, the most successful of its breed.
For whatever it's worth, in the steampunk book cover world, airships seldom get displaced by actual airplanes. But if a cover actually did feature a Victorian airplane, I suspect sales would comparatively suffer.

Sorolla Museum: Pictorial Report

Allow me to confess at the outset that I'm a fan of Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923).

So the morning after arrival in Madrid last month -- before visiting the Prado, Thyssen, Sofia and other well-known art museums -- I hightailed it to the Museo Sorolla, the former home of the artist.

Getting there is fairly easy, provided one is willing to take public transit. (From the Plaza Puerto del Sol, the walk is no less than a mile and a quarter; this can be a serious project on a hot summer day.) Get on or connect with the No. 10 Metro line and exit at Gregorio Marañón station. Then walk two blocks south on the Calle Miguel Angel and turn right onto Paseo General Martínez Campos, a street with mid-rise post-1960 structures. A short distance along the north side is a wall, behind which is the Sorolla house/museum, completed in 1911.

House/Museum

Before entering, one must pass through a garden.

That's the entry. To the right once you enter is a desk where you pay for your visit and buy publications (most or all in Spanish); they will give you a free English-language museum guide.

Looking down on a hall area. The house is laden with objets d'art, as can be seen in this and following photos. These were present when Sorolla lived here.

The dining room.

The living room.

Sorolla's studio as seen from above.

The studio from floor-level.

Another general view of the studio. Note the covered bed at the right. Sorolla was driven to paint. Apparently this compulsion required that at times he wanted to sleep close to his work so as to get back in action as quickly as possible without disturbing others in the household.

Sorolla's Tools
The scene set, let's look at his work setup at the time in 1920 when he suffered a debilitating stroke.

The painting is the one Sorolla was working on at the time of his stroke. It's title is Retrato de la Señora de Pérez de Ayala. In the foreground is Sorolla's working setup.

Another view, this in high resolution: click to enlarge.

Sorolla's paintbox and palettes.

Sorolla's smaller palette.

A high-resolution view. Click to enlarge.

Unfinished Study
Sorolla worked rapidly. He left a number of small oil sketches that probably mostly served as notes from the field. Early in his career he produced works that were relatively "tight" and "finished" in the academic tradition. But his better-known later works, aside from some portraits, were large and painted freely. These and the sketches allow us to understand his methods to some degree.

What is rare are clearly unfinished paintings. Fortunately, the museum has an example of a study made as part of his Regions of Spain commission. Part of the work is "complete" (insofar as Sorolla "finished" his later works). Other parts reveal preliminary on-canvas oil sketching of a person.

Here is a detail of the study. The next views are high-resolution pictures that you can click to enlarge.

Painting-Detail Photos in High-Resolution
Snapping digital photos in museums is usually easy, but getting good high-resolution results is a tricky business. When you glance at a preview image on that tiny camera screen it may seem just fine; but loaded into your computer and viewed, the results are often blurred and stray lighting not noticeable to the naked eye in the gallery can become apparent.

Nothing can be done about odd lighting effects; that's largely beyond your control at the time you're taking the picture. Blurred or out-of-focus results can be tamed to some degree, but not entirely.

One problem is that painted images are not always crisp, making it difficult for camera automatic-focusing software to be sure what the correct focus should be. Expensive, manual-focus cameras can avoid this problem, but those of us with a sub-$800 camera budget are in a pickle in this regard.

In many cases it's not possible to get close to the target area of a painting, so the photographer must zoom in close. In telephoto mode, focusing must be precise. But as I just mentioned, this can be hard to do. Another problem in telephoto is holding the camera steady -- movement is exaggerated in telephoto mode (and some museums don't allow use of a tripod, a helpful device).

Wide-angle photography entails greater depth of field (focus zone) than telephoto, but there are problems here too. One is that too much wide-angle creates distortion. Another is that the photographer has to get close to the part of the canvas that he's interested in if he needs plenty of high-res detail -- but, as noted, often one can't get as near as one would like.

All this is a kind of excuse/apology/rationalization for the spotty quality of the high resolution photos shown below that are intended to provide insights regarding Sorolla's color selection and brushwork. These photos are not as good as I intended, but they're what I took when I was on-site. So take a look and click to enlarge if you're interested and your computer allows it.

High-Resolution Details of Various Paintings

Detail of Trata los blancas 1894.

Detail of self-portrait, 1912.

Detail of Clotilde con traje de noche, 1910.

Detail of another portrait of Clotilde.

Detail of Clotilde en la playa, 1904.

Detail of La bata rosa, 1916.

Detail of woman with mantilla.

Detail of Bajo el toldo, playa de Zarauz, 1910

Detail of Cordeleros de Jávea, 1898.

Detail of painting with three women.


Sorolla's work can be found here and there in the United States, but the largest concentration is at the Hispanic Society in New York City, a site that I, alas, have yet to visit.

Blogging Note

Coming soon:

The day after I arrived in Madrid last month, I beat a path to the former home of the great painter Joaquin Sorolla which now serves as a museum of his works.

Photos were taken, and many will be included in a post dealing with the museum. Among the subjects are Sorolla's last (or nearly so) palette and a large, partly-completed study for his Regions of Spain series revealing (among other details) early stages of defining a human figure.

So if you're a Sorolla fan, stay tuned. And if you have friends who are fans, let them know what's in the works.

Abstract Calendar Art

So there I was, waltzing through the local Barnes & Noble book superstore to grab a cuppa at their captive Starbucks stand when lo! I beheld three long racks devoted to calendars for 2011.

A quick eyeball estimate revealed something on the order of 250 selections, of which around 70 were devoted to art as the main topic. (Other subjects included cars, airplanes, sports, pets, comics, movie stars, nature and even one calendar whose theme was "posters for peace and justice" which might be classed as art even though it wasn't positioned with that grouping.)

Of the art-related calendars, there was one whose theme was abstract art. Closely related were calendars devoted to Paul Klee (main works are a blend of Surrealism-lite and semi-geometric abstraction), Mark Rothko (whose late work dealt with swathes of color) and Ryan McGinness (jumbles of images and design elements that result in an abstract overall effect). Then there were calendars featuring Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol and Marc Chagall -- all of whom did work that can be considered more representational than not. (Yes, Chagall is kind of a borderline case. His classical works sprinkled images of humans and other recognizeable objects across the surface of a canvas in an un-natural manner.)

Doing the math, I come up with a little more than five percent of the calendars dealing with art featuring abstraction and about ten percent explicitly related to modernism. These percentages fall to about a quarter of those numbers if the entire calendar selection is considered.

What we have here is what I'll call an anecdotal measure of the acceptance of modernism by a literate, middle-class-and-over audience. Anecdotal because there are no statistical controls and because I have no knowledge of the process by which those calendars were selected for that particular B&N store. The store in question is located less than a mile from the University of Washington and within three miles of some of Seattle's most upscale neighborhoods (Laurelhurst and Windemere, to be specific). B&N seems to allow store managers to tailor stock to fit the locality. For example, this store has a good selection of art books whereas other Seattle B&Ns are more lacking. But I don't know if this applies to seasonal items such as those calendars; for all I know, each Barnes & Noble is sent the same general selection.

Statistical and methodological uncertainties aside, what I saw makes me wonder how far hard-core modernist painting and graphic arts have actually penetrated to the general public after more than a century of "education" by all the various promoters of modernism as the "appropriate" art for our times. If that B&N is even a remotely decent example, even in educated neighborhoods people reject modernism in the privacy of their kitchens, dens and other places where calendars are hung.

Mies' Barcelona Pavilion Walk-Around

There are gobs, oodles -- whatever term for large numbers -- of photos of Mies van der Rohe's iconic "International Style" German Pavilion built for a 1929 exhibition in Barcelona, destroyed after the event, and rebuilt in the mid-1980s. The Wikipedia entry on the Barcelona Pavilion (its common name) is here and another reference is here.

Unlike most modernist architecture, the Barcelona Pavilion oozed sex appeal and thereby served as inspiration for architects who had to hide in the bomb-shelters of Theory during the hard times of the Great Depression, the distraction of World War 2 and the five or ten years of post-war sorting-out that all took place before "significant" modernist buildings began appearing in number.

I confess that when in high school and college, I loved gazing at black and white photos of the original pavilion and lamenting its loss. And despite the aesthetic ruin manifested by across-the-board modernist architecture we have to live with today, I retain a soft spot in my heart for the pavilion -- van der Rohe's only real masterpiece (in my opinion, of course).

So when I recently found myself in Barcelona for the first time, the pavilion was on my must-see list along with certain works by Antoni Gaudí that I'll deal with later.

I mentioned above that many sets of photos exist of the rebuilt pavilion; they are all over the Web. Many are of nice, professional quality. Nevertheless, I thought I'd use this post to toss in my two bits worth of photos taken during a brief visit I paid while on my way to the big museum featuring Catalonian art. Here goes:

This is the Barcelona Pavilion in its present setting (it's that low, white structure in the background). From what I read, it's sited where the original was in 1929; presumably the large, open area was filled with other pavilions then.

Here's the entrance approach for those coming from the direction of the Plaça d'Espanya. You climb those steps and deal with the fellow on the platform to pay admission.

Admission paid, I entered and was facing towards the right side of the structure.

As in 1929 this area (can I call it a "room"?) has some Barcelona Chairs and hassocks. In the background is the same statue (so far as I know) by Georg Kolbe that was in the original pavilion.

Moving past the Barcelona Chairs to the pool area and statue. I included some of the structure at the left of the photo so that you can see how it is arranged.

I've walked a few steps and am now at the back side of the interior; here's how the statue's setting looks from this position.

Doing an about-face, I see this view along the back of the structure. That small enclosure in the background might have been office space in 1929: today, it's a bookshop.

These three photos are a kind of panorama of the back side of the pavilion, something not always pictured. It's quite possible that the place I was standing was occupied by other buildings making this vista unimportant in 1929, but I cannot confirm this.

Moving towards the front, here's a view of the large pool with its stony bottom. In the shady background is that shop.

Returning almost to the entrance, I see this. The seated man is the ticket seller.

Finally, a parting shot of the Barcelona Pavilion.

What's Not Where

I'm back from Spain, Portugal and Morocco. And still wiping the jet lag cobwebs from my brain -- but post, I must.

For starters, here are two slogans I came across:

This was taken at Casa Pepe, a road house just off the Autovia between Granada and Madrid. Pepe seems to be a huge fan of General Franco, the late Caudillo of Spain (I'll have more on Pepe's place in another post.) The slogan on the sign to the right can be translated as "This is Spain, not Europe."

I noticed this in Barcelona between the Plaça d'Espanya and the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. It's in English, presumably to get the message across to a wide foreign audience. Catalunya (better known to English speakers as Catalonia) is a region in northeastern Spain that has its own dialect which is slightly similar to dialects in southern France. Not all Catalonians consider themselves Spanish, it seems.