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SPAIN
Barcelona—Not the Alhambra,
but Significant
By
Jheri St.James.
Scott Methvin, Laguna Beach, California, Festival of Arts
exhibitor-artist, talked about the soil he collected in
Barcelona, Spain, in 2002. Sitting in his studio, surrounded
by paintings done on sheets of copper, and jars of what
he calls colored dirt, from which he manufactures his own
oil paint, Scott said, “I’ve been all over
Spain—Madrid, Malaga, a bunch of places. We did a
lot of walking around all over Barcelona on these ramblas,
which are like the Champs Elysees of France. And I thought
you had to fill up that big container, and then I would
have had to carry that much stuff. So I waited until I got
to Barcelona, our last port of call on the cruise. I went
to the nautical museum there right before I had to go back
to the ship. An interesting place with a park attached to
it, I found a place where I was able to dig up some dirt
with my hands.”
He would have liked to get the dirt from Granada near the Alhambra, but it was
too early in his journey. “Because it’s not like any dirt will do.
It has to be real dirt from somewhere. If you’re going to go to all that
trouble, you kind of want it to be good dirt. You walk down the street and you
do see construction sites, but that’s not significant soil and the construction
guys would be very suspicious. Why wouldn’t they? They would be here in
the U.S.”
The soil that Scott collected from Spain was loamy topsoil. Spain is rich in
significant soil—mercury, iron ore, hard coal, pyrites, lignite, anthracite,
gypsum, potash and salt are used to make up a huge mining industry. This variety
of soil constituents seems to parallel the number of cultures that have ruled
this flamboyant land—Celts, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans,
Vandals, Visigoths, Moors and finally the Christians, beginning before history
was even recorded. So this is a soil which has seen much conflict over centuries
of military chess games. How relevant that a small part of it will now be memorialized
for what it started out to be—common ground.
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