When you come towards the end of the winding road that leads you from the highway to the water, you look down and see a turnaround where buses and cars are parked and people are standing on stone walls taking snapshots of the ocean for their scrapbooks.
I am looking for a white pueblo styled house, ” Casa Pueblo” built somewhere on this peninsula.
Not seeing it, I backtrack and ask a lady with her daughter where the Casa Pueblo is? The woman points and moves her hand a little to the right, pointing over a hill I can’t see through.
I walk back down the winding road, go further than I had before, and spy a smaller road cutting away to the right from this main road. A few more steps and I see white adobe style walls that can only be the famous Casa Pueblo built on a cliff overlooking the ocean.
There are vehicles parked along both sides of the narrow road leading up to its entry and people are trekking towards the National Monument like ants following a jungle trail.
Casa Pueblo is home and studio of Carlos Paez Vilaro, Uruguay’s most famous artist.
Whereas art can be done quickly, building takes more time. There are engineering problems, aesthetic questions, debates about whether concrete and wood can do the things you are asking them to do. In New Mexico, as well as here, materials are touched by hands. Cement is mixed and poured by the wheelbarrow load. Walls are plastered with hand tools and left uneven and undulating.
Wandering up and down stairs through the home and studio and gift shop and hotel and museo, inside and out, there are unexpected turns and twists.
For the longest time it is very comfortable for me just to sit on the back observation deck and look at the water below me change colors. I can stand at the deck railing and look at hotel guests in bikinis trying to get brown when the sun is behind a cloud.
Men’s minds are not all made the same way but if my house was built to fit my mind’s interior it would look a lot like this.
Most of us have castles in our minds, but we just can’t afford to buy them, or build them.
Drawing is about lines.
You have straight lines, curved lines, and a combination of both. With line you begin reproducing what you see, then drawing what you imagine, then making something new that hasn’t been seen before. Something must have snapped as Carlos put pencil on paper, chalk on paper, paint on canvas, clay on the wheel, murals on big city walls around the world.
In his work you see Picasso and the influence of ancient cultures of South and Central America – the Aztecs, Incas, Mayans. You see the influence of African masks and Ancient Greek sculptures. Art fed him like a farmer eating from his own garden.
Some of the works in the gift shop are not to my taste, but that means little. There are many foods but you don’t have to like them all to make them good for someone.
Vilaro’s older works are surprisingly as inquisitive as the early ones since age seems to diminish chance taking and creativity.
I like it here. This place resonates like a ringing dinner bell as the sun goes down and candles are lit on white tablecloths.
At the end of the day, photos are sifted and sorted, evaluated, approved, or deleted.
You take as many photos as possible on trips because you know not all things you shoot are going to work. It takes only a quick point, shoot, then you put the camera back into your pocket, as you walk.There is nothing complicated about snapping a photo.
Sometimes, you look at the camera roll and find something serendipitous. You either see something in a photo you didn’t see when you first shot it, or, you see a mistake that interests you. It wasn’t planned, but it tweaks interest. This photo is one of these second types.
This odd photo is of me and my shadow.
Sometimes I don’t know where my shadow is, but most bright days, when I turn, just so, Mr. Shadow is right with me.
There used to be an old vaudeville song called “Me and My Shadow.” The entertainer would strut across the stage, looking over his shoulder, trying to catch his shadow catching him. It was a catchy Tin Pan Alley song and a catchy show stopper. People loved it. The only reason I remember is the performer played clarinet, and I play clarinet.
The vaudeville entertainer was Ted Lewis. You can Google ” Me and My Shadow ” and catch his thing on You Tube.
A reviewer of the Ted Lewis clarinet playing called it, ” The last anguish of a dying dog. ”
He might have been too kind.
Right across from the bus terminal in Punta Del Este at Parada 1, Bravo Beach, is ” The Hand.”
It is difficult not to see the outside beach sculpture if you are anywhere near it. The” Hand” is only the tips of three fingers and a thumb rising out of the sand, but the fingers motion to you to come closer.
This sculpture was created in 1982 by a Chilean sculptor Mario Irarrazabel as part of an art competition and it wasn’t, at first, his most favored project.
It has remained here, since then, intact.
The fingers rise out of the sand higher than most people stand.
The art work has been called “Men Emerging to Life,” “Monument of the Fingers,” “Monument to the Drowned,” “The Hand.” The artist didn’t like the third title much, according to Wikipedia, but once your works are on their own you can’t say much about how they are received and what is done to them.
This afternoon visitors pose, touch the fingers and hang out.
One morning, the Hand might rise from the sand a bit more, exposing its massive wrist.
We would then need a ladder to climb up to pose for our picture sitting in the huge open palm. .
From any angle I look, I can see that the ” Hand ” will always be a manicurist’s dream job.
Artists always make us pay attention when we start to drift into numbing routine.
I haven’t been to Greek islands but they must be similar to this place.
Following the Rambla past the port, past expensive homes, you reach the end of the Punta Del Este peninsula. At the end is a parking lot with exercise equipment, two mermaids, a flagpole with a Uruguayan flag flying, and an old man standing perilously close to incoming waves as he tries to fish rough waters while a friend watches.
These two mermaids are made from a concrete mix but they have been damaged. The tail of one has been severed from her body. There are limbs missing from both .
The statues look alive from a distance and you have to watch to make sure they aren’t moving to realize they are just sculptures. You can walk up to them and that is their problem. It doesn’t take much alcohol for someone to get carried away and vent frustration on two Goddesses who can’t fight back because a workman has anchored their tails in concrete.
The two old men fishing are being bold. Wind is kicking up waves and the one who is fishing is very close to being caught in one and becoming whisked out to sea.
At the end of land, I look for Neptune to rise out of the water with his seaweed fouled trident and demand to know what offerings I am making.
I haven’t been to Greek islands but it is easy to see how they came to have Gods and Goddesses.
There are forces in this universe we don’t control.
Building temples and worshiping God’s is not a bad precaution.
Tango began in the early 1900’s in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
Beginning in brothels, like American jazz, it was refined and adopted by middle and upper classes, cleaned up and turned into a respectable music and dance form.
Dance competitions usually contain the tango, a sensual dance with complicated movements and hypnotic music.
In front of one of the cafes near my studio, there is a demonstration of tango with a lady who is much older than her partner. She is dressed in black with net stockings and clipped black hair. The couple move over rough tiles as music plays loudly from a little black speaker.The traditional tango is played by an orchestra that has a piano, two accordions, two violins and a double bass. This recorded music is just violins.
For an entire song, we in the audience watch the pair move in ever widening, and then contracting, circles in front of the restaurant. She makes most of the movements, dipping her shoulder, lifting her knees, tossing back her head, letting the young man lead.
The themes of Tango are unrequited love, betrayal, the passage of time, and death.
A famous local poet, Enrique Discepolo, called tango “the sad thought that is danced.”
Tango came from poor neighborhoods in Buenos Aires and Montevideo where money runs short and emotions run high.
Cutting edge art flows from those who live closest to their emotions and have empty wallets.
The Urban Heritage group are Old City real estate developers.
Jesper and his wife Olenka, partners in the Group,host an art exposition on the evening of November 7th, 2014 to promote their vision for the area to investors and business people and lovers of the arts.
At seven, art lovers, friends, associates, clients, friends of the band, hired help arrive to celebrate art, business,and throw a grand party. In addition to art by local artist Roberto Ybarra, there are posters of Urban Heritage properties prominently displayed that show what can be done to change abandoned industrial properties into good looking functional living and business spaces.
Roberto works with wood, string, metal, paper, leather, and found objects. He is an older man but does young art, Roberto’s show blurs differences between reality and art.
When does an object belong in a museum? When does art become just a bed you can’t sleep on? Is art more than materials that make it? Is art a way of looking, or a way of living? Is art what we see or what goes on in our own head when we look at it, or both?
” Violinista”, a small work I buy, is now hung on my dining room room wall at home and brings back memories. I swear sometimes that the violinists bow moves and makes a trill so soft it would make a conductor cry.
When I see my violinist and remember Montevideo, I start to hum a slow sultry tango.
Blues chords aren’t complex, the rhythms and melodies aren’t sophisticated, the harmony is a step down from folk music but several steps below jazz.
Stevie Ray Vaughn isn’t the only white blues man to make it big and suffer an untimely end. He has been gone a while but the songs this group are playing, on Sarandi Street, are straight from his Real Book.
This street band features a bass guitar and a lead guitarist who handles vocals. Percussion is supplied by a kid sitting on a drum box. They have microphones positioned so I hear them from blocks away.
The bass guitar player asks where I am from during a break, and, when I answer, in English, he points me to the lead singer who speaks the best English.
Uruguayans are friendly and helpful people and unfailingly good with gringos trying to speak their language. It is sweet the way they always talk about their bad English, but never mention my abysmal Spanish.
The guys jam, hit notes, stick with the beat – one, two, three, four, one, two,three, four beats to a bar.
I sit on a wide stone window ledge in front of a men’s clothing store and listen to an entire set and make sure I leave them money in an open guitar case.
Texas blues sound good anywhere.
In old Montevideo. I call the band ” Men in Black. ”
Stevie would be pleased.
Walking towards Constitution Plaza from Independence Plaza, there are bronze Generals on horseback every block, as well as little plaza’s and parks.
There is something sad about memorializing heroes in bronze and then placing them outside where pigeons squat on their pointed military hats and defecate on their medals. It is an unfitting end for men who have contributed so much to their country.
There are plenty of fountains on this boulevard too, mostly in the center of plazas with water pouring from jars held by Roman Goddesses or shooting from the pursed lips of cherubs. These fountains sometimes have no water, waiting for maintenance men to hook up lines, clean the pond, paint the walls of the pool. Occasionally, in front of well financed government buildings, you find ponds with water lilies and colorful fish.
In Constitution Park the fountain is generic and empty of water and I am startled because it appears one of the statues from this fountain has been moved by delinquents in front of my McDonalds.
There is a small jar filled with money at the statues feet.
Stepping back and watching, I watch the statue lips move and I see her breathe.
The makeup on her face is thick and her hair is perfect. She remains still and doesn’t make eye contact until I drop a bill into her jar. Then she bows and smiles, reaches into a pocket and hands me my personal fortune written in Spanish, which I have since lost, but am sure it wished me a long and prosperous life with a wife that loves me and seven or eight children who get good grades in school and go to bed on time.
I wave at her, she smiles at me, her palms opening and closing as she clicks two wood castanets. She finishes with a bow, to me, and returns to her statue position.
It is easy to get mentally lazy.
She has made this day spicy, and, for that, she is a real Goddess.
This live concert is next to the Mercado, about lunchtime. There are posters advertising it on phone poles but their music grabs me by the ear through my open studio window and drags me to come watch and listen.
This band calls themselves ,” Murga Don Timoteo”, a local group sponsored by a local paint company.
They perform with style, sporting costumes that look more African and Brazilian than Uruguayan, and, despite their visual cornucopia, they sing with precision, clipping notes that need to be clipped and holding notes that need holding with dynamics and vibrato.
Good singing is good to find and this free concert is good luck for a music lover like myself.
If this chorus line wasn’t dressed up like Las Vegas dancers, would their music sound as good as it does?
The answer, of course, is ,Yes.
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