Fragments of Portuguese Culture, Fado.

"Joy of Fado" watercolour sketch.

Fragments of Portuguese Culture

Fado, the spirit of Portugal, more than the country’s port epitomize what it means to be Portuguese. This music with its sense of passion and pathos somehow tears at your very soul. I first heard Fado on ABC Classic FM one morning, an Australian radio station specializing in “serious” music. The singer was Misia, her voice full of pathos, had that soul wrenching quality that all great Fado should have. Her voice became the sound of Lisbon during the city’s year as Europe’s Cultural Capital in 1993. This first experience occurred without warning making the impact all the more dramatic. I had no knowledge of Fado, but the passion and magic of Misia’s singing aroused a desire  for more, and indirectly knowledge about  Portugal.

I decided to spend a few months there painting and attempting to come to some understanding of Portuguese culture. As I travelled around, I heard Fado drifting across the cities from street vans, apartments, to formal rending in cafes, and a very controlled form of Fado in Coimbra, were this music seemed to be more confined to male voices, rather than the female Queens of Lisbon. Personally I found the female version more passionate and personal. Though at times, their singing can descend  into pop music without the haunting quality of true Fado. The performance I attended in Coimbra was rather stiff, and according to the compare this was the proper Fado, not that female Lisbon version. The Coimbra version was widely sung by male University students dressed in academic gowns, on street corners, where they gave voice to protestsongs during the Salazar years.

Fado has been around for a long time, singer like Amalia Rodrigues, a cultural icon popularised this unique music world wide during her fifty year career. No one seems to know where it originated, it has been suggested the music was left behind by the moors, others that it came to Portugal via the African slaves in Brazil. There is another school of thought that Fado grew out of the waterfront dives of Lisbon, in the same way tango was born in the seedy districts of Buenos Aires, but no matter where this music originated, it has a presence all of its own. A music that invades the senses.

Portugal has many contradictions, a very Catholic country that saw fit to dissolve all the monasteries in the 19^th cent. Whether this was due to  lack of leadership by the Church after the Lisbon earthquake I don’t know, but the minister Pombal expelled the Jesuits after the devastation in the 18^th cent. I found this closure of convents rather strange for a fairly religious country, There seemed to be many shrines and pilgrim steps ever where in Portugal, particularly in the north around  Braga where pilgrimes climb steps on their knees as penance for past sins. Many of these monasteries, now museums, are very Spartan. One I visited just outside Sintra, The Convent of the Holy Cross built in 1560 had been cut into the hillside, its stone walls wet with seepage, narrow passageways and low ceilings all added to a sense of austerity. How the young monks survived I have no idea. Parts of the ceiling were covered in cork panels, but these areas were for the more senior monks. the Order of  Friers were noted for the extreme simplicity of their lives. The day I visited a T.V. crew was making a documentry, so many rooms were crowded. It reminded me of a visit I made to the Basilica of St. John in Selcui, Turkey were a film crew were making a film and forgot to tell their "Roman Guards" to take their wrist watches off. 

                                                     Pilgrim Steps.

Another contradiction were the Portuguese driver, as a people they are charming, very helpful, and kind, but once behind the wheel of a car a personality change takes place. They seem to revert to the sort of behaviour of a teenage boy driving his first car. Refusal to give way, make rude gestures, and their general reckless driving has to be seen to be believed, I have no idea what the road morality is like, but it must be high Maybe the new EU road network has encouraged them to try out for Formula One raceing. But not to end on a sour note, I really enjoyed my stay, I achieved a lot returning with a lot of work to develop, and am looking forward to a return visit.

Abstract painting titled "Fado"

This will give you some idea how I developed the titles, music and general spirt of Portugal.

Toys are Memory

Museum of Bringuedo
Sintra, Portugal

  TOYS ARE FOREVER.

Toys are fairly central to most childhoods, whether a simple piece of wood, a rag doll or some sophisticated western what not. No matter what your childhood economic circumstances, we treasure those moments of pure imagination, when we could create our own world and people it accordingly. Years ago I had visited a Money Box Museum in Amsterdam, all very Dutch, but still I was surprised to find a Toy Museum in Sintra, Portugal, so people establish museums for all sorts of things.

The Museum of Bringuedo in the centre of Sintra, possesses a very fine collection of some 40,000 toys ranging from 1930’s Hornby train sets, lead soldiers, dolls, and every other kind of toy imaginable. Collections of any sort must reflect to a great extent the interests of the collector, and when I cast back into my own memory and recall the World War II battles I played out under the dining table, because an uncle of mine had lent me his collection of 1930’s German lead soldiers.

The owner and founder of this museum turned out to be an elderly gentleman, now unfortunately confined to a wheelchair due to a recent stroke. This however, did not stop him from doing the rounds of “his museum”. Luckily he was very talkative and only too anxious to talk about his passion. He had been collecting  all his life, and had set up a repair and restoration workshop in the museum where children of all ages could bring their treasures for renewal. Many toys are discarded, and he felt it was his duty to give them new life. Everything in this world has memory that has witnessed different time frames. I am sure if this establishment had been around during Hans Christian Andersen stay in Sintra, he would have felt a great affinity. The owner had built a special playroom with puppets and story tellers, so each child could relive their own make-believe worlds.

Apart from this great collection of lead soldiers from every corner of the globe, he had acquired a few ancient bronze toys from Syria some 3000 years old. There were also a few carved marble toys, also from the Middle East. I believe simple moulded clay toy animals have been found in Anatolia dated 6000BC. It is a great pity that as adults, we tend to forget the joys of childhood when time is always the present. When anything is possible, and we endow our toys with a life of their own, and the only restriction is imagination. I often wonder whether in this contemporary world of  were children are fed a diet of preprogramed toys, and technological wonders whether children are the real losers in their inability to entertain themselves, were everything is in the fast lane, and there is no time to think and dream.

Sintra Portuguese Sketches

PALACE OF PENA, SINTRA

            

Clinging to the northern slopes of the Serra, some forty-five minutes by train from Lisbon sits Sintra.  This former summer capital of the Portuguese Kings, offers the early morning  raiser a sight not to be missed.  Covered in early morning  mountain mist, castle turrets, conical chimneys, and segments of peaks piece the clouds offering the most jaded traveller a fairy tale vista. It is little wonder that the town has attracted writers, musicians, and artists over the centuries. Hans Christen Andersen spent a year here writing fairy tales, while Richard Strauss on visiting Palacio da Pena, believed he had found the home of the Holy Grail. Strauss recorded in his diary, “This is the happiest day of my life, I have travelled in Italy, Sicily, Greece and Egypt, but have never seen anything to equal Pena. It is the most beautiful sight I have ever witnessed. This is the true Klingsor garden and up there above  in the Towers  the Castle the Holy Grail.”

                                                               

Rua Marechal, Sintra. 

A typcial Sintra street, old walls, cobble stoned road.

There is more to Sintra than the Castle of Pena, the town is rich in Royal Palaces, Castles, Museums and parks, not to mention the numerous mansions built by the mega rich from South America and the Royal families of Europe. I had decided to spend the next month here gathering material for a painting exhibition. The difficult part was going to be what to ignore, every where I looked picturesque scenes presented themselves. After spending the first week walking along cobblestone lanes, visiting churches, and viewing Moorish fountains, I decided to attempt to covey the many layers of Portuguese history through the tile decoration, so much loved in this country. Nearly every building in Portugal appears to be covered in ceramic tiles; the use of this form of decorative motif often is included in the original architectural design. Many architects design the tiles themselves, while the many ceramic tile workshops employ several artists to create and carry out the design and painting. No building is considered complete without some form of artwork, Portugal must be an artists’ paradise. I visited several of these workshop during my stay.

One of my paintings based on the walls and old Moorish tiles.

     100x70 cm. on board textured, acrylic paint. $1500.

                               

 I carried out many on the spot sketches and reworked them into abstract designs. Fragmented tile patterns surrounded by textured walls, I broke the complete tiles up to create a sense of history as they are in their own way fragments of past memory. I was quite pleased with the way the watercolour washes on the walls took on a cork like appearance, this allowed me to develop three very important elements of Portugal, the legacy of Moorish tiles, textured stonewalls, and the cork trees.

Watercolour sketch

                                                      Further development of tile sketchs

Sintra is full of surprise, it houses one of the best private modern art collections of the 20^th cent. The Berardo Collection, includes many major artists of this century, Magritte, Pollock, Bacon and Warhol to name just a few. Joe Berardo’s collection is so large, that it seemed as though half the works in the Museum of Modern Art in Lisbon are on loan from his museum. Then there is the eccentric Brazilian millionaire’s contribution, Antonio Monteriro’s Quinta da Regaleira built in 1890. This feast of the absurd is filled with every kind of folly imaginable, secret grottoes, forts, castles, underground lakes, this would have to be one of the great examples of exoteric. There is even an underground staircase taking you down some 27m into the earth to what is called the Guardians Gate. This several acres of park of follies have been built around classical mythology, were Monteriro has tried to recreate the worlds Virgil, Dante, and Milton , with a touch of the Knights Templars thrown in, a world to delight any child.

One of the follys at Antonio Monteriro's Quinta da Regalira

The Palace of Pena set on a mountain top creates a presence all of its own. Set within a large park like woodland, the visitor wanders along numerous paths and tracks, until you suddenly come across the palace. Built at a time of great Portuguese wealth were no cost has been spared. The range of architectural detail and décor is hard to describe, but the range  runs from The Arab Room, to an over the top 16^th cent alabaster Chapel filled with every kinf of oddities from every corner of the globe. Then there is the King’s oval shaped bedchamber,  a ballroom lit by German stained glass windows complete with four life-sized turbaned torchbearers holding a giant candelabra. I need say no more,

 One afternoon Heather and I were taken by our host to a little summer house rebuilt by a Professor of Architecture at Lisbon University. This little building consisted of two floors, one room to each floor with a narrow staircase joining them, with a tiny bathroom halfway down the stairs. The great delight in this building was theunusal use of eye patterns and reliefs on the walls and around windows, even the patio chairs had eyes cut into their backs. The whole house was a delight and very imaginative, although I don’t know how two people could live there at the same time!

Walking the track to the National Park I came across this scene near the church of Santa Maria. Every day I would climb the mountain roads, forever going up and down, so we discovered many little treasures tucked away in the hilly landscape such as the church below Santa Maria.

Santa Maria.

The church of Santa Maria first conceived in the 12th centit took many centries to complete. The church is one of the few remaing examples of medieval architecture. The building has a Gothic Romantic feel, in this sense it encompass the spirit of Sintra. The church face the little square above.