A visit to southern Peru: Puno; part three, down by the market

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Puno, red car, woman, oil on card, 15 x 16.5 cm  SOLD

Puno, a lady in a red skirt, oil on card, 14 x 12 cm  SOLD

This picture above, above, is one of the best from this trip. It convey's the rugged feel of the place well in the roughness of technique.

Puno, late afternoon, oil on card, 16 x 18 cm - available

I continued this way: a cross between impressionism, and art brut approach (not so much a choice as an instinct) working rapidly and directly. It has something to do with saying- these are the limits of my capacity to know, I can only see so much now, let me not pretend.

 The places depicted here are in some senses ugly, unfinished, in other senses they are places with potential, rudely muscular like many young places in Latin America,

Puno, people going about their business, oil on card, 13 x 14 cm  AVAILABLE

The last four pictures revive the sense of stimmung, the concept of  which de Chirico writes about eloquently with reference to Nietszche, and seeks to introduce into his own work. He describes(from The Memoirs og Giorgio de Chirico,  translated by Margaret Crosland, Da Capo Press, 1994):

 ...a strange and profound poestry, infinately mysterious and solitary...this extraordinary sensation can be found (but it is necessary, naturally, to have the good fortune to posess my exceptional faculties) uin Italian cities  and in Mediterranean cities like Genoa or Nice; but the Italian city par excellence where this phenomenan appears is Turin.

Does the  clear light of the Andes which resembles that of de Chirico`s Turin?

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These streets contain many incidents, and suggest the possibility of incident. They are market streets but given my aversion to people watching me while I worked, I painted the less busy streets.

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A double carrier

The double carriers worked reasonably well. There were difficulties with one: the cases have to allow for the fact that in hot weather the card supports start to buckle in the sun and take up three or four times the depth than otherwise, so it is best to compensate for this with fairly deep case frames.

 I used glue rather than blu-tac to hold the pictures. It seems more secure than the blu-tac. The pictures can be removed from the carriers fairly easily. 

These carriers allow me to take considerably more pictures home with me, and therefore open the possibility of longer trips? thus Ecuador, in January, might well be a whole month.

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A visit to southern Peru: Puno; part two, in the neighbourhood

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Puno, the end of a street, oil on card, 14 x 15 cm  - sold

Puno, man, dog, oil on card, 12 x 13.5 cm 

These were painted in the streets north-west of the Plaza de Armas, an area possessed of considerable mystery.

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The street as an event

"And then began the tour of that strange building situated in a street that looked forbidding, although it was distinguished and not gloomy. As seen from the street the building was reminiscent of a German Consulate in Melbourne. Its ground floor was entirely taken up with large stores. Although it was neither Sunday nor a holiday, the stores were closed, endowing this part of the street with an air of tedium and melancholy, a certain desolation, that particular atmosphere which pervades Anglo-Saxon towns on Sundays." Translated by Margaret Crosland, Peter Owen, London 1964

Thus begins Giorgio de Chirico's beautiful novel, "Hebdomeros".

I lost details of the passage in my memory, forgetting the "tedium" and only remembering the sense of tranquility, perhaps conflating de Chirico's text with his paintings which are often melancholy but never tediously so.

I used to detest Sundays in the UK: the sense of desolation depressed me no end, and caused me to resent the church. I believe nowadays the UK is more of a 24 hour culture so younger British readers of de Chirico will be unable to understand his reference.

By contrast, the centre of Florianopolis is dull at weekends, the shops closing early on Saturdays and remaining resolutely shut until Monday. There is not a strong work ethic here: there are restaurants which close between noon and 2pm so the staff can have their lunches. However, it is this dullness which makes for easy architectural photography, because such movement that there is assumes a special significance. I especially like the fellow fixing the pink roof at the left of the picture.

The street as stage set. In de Chirico, the street is a stage set: an idea also present in Balthus's The Street (1933):

What makes the street interesting, in contrast to the mall, is that it is a relatively uncontrolled environment. In the mall, even the climate is controlled, and the level of visual interest is in direct proportion to the lack of surprise. Sectors of the population are excluded in the mall because the shopping mall does not provide facilities to suit their pockets, or because security guards prevent their entry. And, of course, the mall excludes many functions that are offered on the street: churches, natural sights and historic monuments. This prevents the sort of chance encounters that make Balthus's picture amusing. Also, the speed and direction of movement in the mall is controlled too using escalators and lifts.

There is a revolt among the moneyed classes in Brazil against spontaneity because of the high crime rate in large cities. The street is a casualty of this revolt. Instead of reclaiming public space with improved security and reducing the massive disparity between themselves and poorer classes the bourgeoisie have retreated into their malls, condominiums and motor cars.