Blood Lines, mixed media on board, (55 x 38cms) 2015
At BIAB things are in flux. Objects have taken a back seat, painting has resurfaced and research has been on hold. I’ve been on something of a painting jag.
But it’s funny how things twist and turn on this project. An exceptional book has arrived my door and suddenly another window has been opened onto my father’s life, taking me deep into the wound that was that ‘national slaughter’- the Spanish Civil War. My research cap is on again and I begin to see more clearly the truly ghastly complexity of this tragic conflict.
The book is a quite brilliant critique of Constancia de la Mora’s memoir A Place of Splendour. It is called A Spanish Woman in Love and War: Constancia de la Mora, by Soledad Fox. Having read the original memoir this deconstruction has proven fascinating and most revealing. Nothing is as it seems in la Mora’s account of her trajectory from the old order Spanish ‘aristocracy’ to Republican heroine.
http://www.sussex-academic.com/sa/titles/biography/fox.htm
The case of the Republican José Robles Pazos, whose execution in 1936 by ‘uncontrollable elements on the left’ proved to be a final schism between Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos is detailed by Fox (and it is one of many such vital contextual omissions in la Mora’s book). I read these pages in wonder. José’s widow Márgara, and his son and daughter, Coco and Miggie, were among my father’s dearest friends. Their friendship dated back to this time and extended throughout my father’s life. I remember them fondly from when we visited them in exile in Mexico, but I remember Miggie especially for she seemed to be one of my father’s most beautiful and glamorous friends. Miggie also visited us in England when I was in my teens.
I didn’t know about this darkest of histories back then. I knew only my childish sense that the bond between my father and these vivacious and charming friends was one of deep affection and kinship. A special bond, you might say, the kind which infants notice, an impression that holds fast over time. How dreadfully shocking to find this history, which did surface recently as a fragment of oral testimony through my mother (vague and without much detail), so clearly outlined, and to learn of it’s terrible celebrity at the time. Often written about in terms of the rift between two American authors – the personal anguish of a cherished branch of my exile ‘family’ all but stunned me.
Here is one of the articles I found which focuses on José Robles rather than the literary friendship his execution is said to have split asunder. José Robles was never a fascist spy nor a fascist sympathiser, this I know (with all my being) and it feels of the utmost importance to say so. Yet the fact remains that José Robles – so loyal to the Republic that he refused to return to his academic post in Baltimore but chose to stay to defend Republican ideals was killed by a faction on the left – and the ‘mystery’ behind his capture and killing was whitewashed.
http://krieger2.jhu.edu/magazine/sp11/f4.html
It’s in this context that a new painting arrived, demonstrating something of the way research impacts practice – sometimes in dramatic and very obvious ways. It contains new elements and surprises. The title is Blood Lines, which refer of course to kinship, but also to the letting of blood in that terrible war. The lines I’ve been gradually etching into the surface of my work most recently have now broken out entirely in Blood Lines. I don’t feel like being subtle I guess. There is huge symbolism in this painting – a kind of compacted narrative which is much clearer than in previous paintings. At first this troubled me. Usually I prefer oblique approaches.
But I am now right in the middle of the deepest wound perhaps – the self-inflicted blows from within the Republic. So shameful and delicate it pains me to even speak of them, and yet I must. So I do it in pictorial form and in honour of José, Márgara, Coco and Miggie I must say it out loud. In doing so I leave partiality behind me and speak up for humanity.
One pictorial surprise was to learn that I had created lines which run from a suitcase inspired block of brick red to a marbled floor-like block of warm light yellow and orange hues. This then was both a Retirada suitcase and the entrance to my grandmother’s flat. I had conflated two eras and two surface spaces, without realising it at first. The lines run through time and history – the echoes ran through my childhood and are felt even now. The line continues and there is both blood and ink. As I stood back from the final decision to paint the second part of these lines a truer red (knowing that this was blood) I drew breath. Scrabbling through studio drawers I finally fished out a bag containing an old typewriter ribbon I have been keeping for assemblage – red and blue lines run through it of course! The history is here, the history runs through it and must be spoken. In Blood Lines I do.
Rest in peace familia Robles.
José Robles Pazos
