In fact, the piece is composed of surfaces where countless people once sat, drank, talked, listened to music, and passed the time. The panels were the tops of stools at A Reixa, a 30-year-old rock bar in the old quarter of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. “It was a place we went to a lot,” Galician artist Misha Bies Golas told me recently, “and I always saw those stools as monochromes. I made the bar some new panels in the same colors and traded them for the old ones,” he explained about the resulting sculpture.

This is how the artist works: with his eyes open to the latent potential in even the most everyday elements around him. Working from this generous and generative position, Bies Golas is always ready to transform an unexpected object into art. The shift from barstool to sculpture comes from the artist’s ethos of experimental unfixedness, in which unlikely things gain alternate functions and readings when met with keen attention and intervention. Likening him to the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann, curator Juan de Nieves writes that for Bies Golas, “art ‘is never the object itself,’ rather the set of impressions, evocations, and meanings — however unlikely they may be — that it produces in our minds.”

The piece, “Sen título (A Reixa)” (2016), is one of more than 100 artworks currently on display at the artist’s expansive solo exhibition at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC). Sensitively curated by de Nieves, the show presents a varied selection of Bies Golas’s production from the past 15 years. Throughout, there’s a playful studiousness in the way that the artist moves between materials and meanings. In “Sen título (A Reixa),” for example, he suddenly brings the relics of a scrappy Galician bar into dialogue with the legacy of minimalism, Arte Povera, and other respected and canonized art idioms. At the same time, this and other unconventional works unfailingly pique viewers’ curiosity about their material, process, and origins.

On the other side of the gallery, a photo of a discarded paper towel on a trash can is paired with a smaller photo of the Nike of Samothrace, the magnificent 2nd century BC Greek statue that has stood at the top of the Louvre’s main staircase since the end of the 19th century. Here, Bies Golas has not only preserved a literal throw away moment; with his tongue firmly in cheek, he has tied the paper towel visually to a sculpture that — both in its history and present location — represents the grandest, most enshrined pillars of Western art history. In this and other works, we see the artist constantly looking, noticing, connecting to and winking at the cultural traditions that he is also a part of, and even moreso in the CGAC museum setting.

Other works reference major 20th century Spanish sculptors like Alberto Sánchez Pérez (1895-1962) and José Diáz Fuentes (1940-2010), whose pieces appear in reproductions that Bies Golas interrogates with his characteristic mix of interest and irreverence. The show also platforms the artist’s own creative contemporaries. Collaborations with and artworks by Ana H. del Amo, Fernando García, Tatiana Medal, and others including his Nova Escultura Galega group (Alejandra Pombo Su, Jorge Varela, and Diego Vites) reflect Bies Golas’s open attitude towards authorship, which clearly rejects the solemnity and lonely loftiness of a single, authorized art maker.

Critiques of Western art history and systems of value like these are subtly pointed. “Sen título (A Reixa)” and other works present “a sort of perversion of minimalism,” de Nieves says. “It is not a question of replicating this movement, but rather of exposing the mechanisms for the validation and insertion of the works into the institutional system and, therefore, into our beliefs about the modes of production and consumption of art.” To a certain degree, Bies Golas works within art norms — his work is being featured at one of the country’s most prestigious museums, after all — yet the largely self-taught, Lalín-based artist also remains outside of many of its usual parameters. It’s a delicate dance that Bies Golas executes with humor and aplomb. Throughout, the sincere and exploratory question of what art can be is at the tender core of his work.

With this in mind, it’s hard not to mention the recent controversy about the leadership and future of the place where Bies Golas’s excellent exhibition is currently being held. In a conversation between the artist and curator, Bies Golas recounts his memory of visiting the CGAC for the first time, joined by his brother the curator Ángel Calvo Ulloa, in 1995. At the time, de Nieves was beginning his own career at the same institution, and both noted the pivotal impact that the place played in their professional trajectories, in Galicia’s cultural scene, and in expanding in a larger sense visitors’ understanding of art, possibility, thought, and the world.

Among other things, Bies Golas’s show is proof of an institution’s ability to empower those who encounter it. The artist’s compelling work and de Nieves’s thoughtful curation match the greatness of the museum’s past, but what comes next for the embattled CGAC? In the face of uncertainty, I am reminded of Bies Golas’s installation “Sombras,” where a large, dimly room is filled with floating obstacles. A small flashlight sits to one side, but we don’t find it unless we look for it. Once it’s in our hand, it shines brightly, casting things into sharp relief. The resulting shadows and light transform what we didn’t see in the half-darkness.

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Seeing Andrés Rodís’s work in photos isn’t the same as seeing them in person. In the bright, open space of Galería Vilaseco, his paintings reveal themselves to be surprisingly seductive, both for their layered but not quite labored surfaces, and for their enigmatic compositions. In Cuando ahora, Rodís presents pictures of triangles and blotchy lines that meander and skew, suggesting shade, depth, and flatness at turns. The artist’s explorations of painting, substrate, abstraction, and systems reminded me of the work of Patrick Michael Fitzgerald, who I interviewed last year.

There’s a refreshing mix of artists and artworks in Carte Blanche, the fourth in Galería Nordés’s series of artist-curated shows. This time the innovative textile artist and sculptor Chelo Matesanz is at the helm, and her three invitees are Manuel Mata, Ventura Pérez, and Ander Sagastiberri. The show is an unusual blend of Matesanz’s wall mural, Pérez’s exquisite copper plate drawings and and enormous, tent-like garment, Sagastiberri’s esoteric illuminated texts in three languages, and Mata’s quirky, poetic, and very Cesar Aira-esque posters. On the one titled “Things to Say Out Loud at this Exhibition,” one of Mata’s suggestions is to ask “What’s all of this for?” I don’t know, but it felt worth looking at for quite a while.

I’m going to be honest: I don’t know much about fashion photography, and I’m not really a fan. I always question how successful the pictures would be if their subjects weren’t professionally attractive, and I’m skeptical of the genre’s close ties to commercial forces. (Though really, what art isn’t somehow about money, in the end?) But the Paolo Roversi: Doubts show at The MOP Foundation was hard to resist. The exhibition is a series of dark, small rooms that gradually open and brighten. Roversi’s many references to the major paintings of Western art history showed his close study of the ways women have been and are depicted in visual culture. And the photographer’s rare colors, elusive blurs, and uncanny effects — many of them conjured well before Photoshop or AI — are undeniably entrancing, and seem almost alchemical.

Regina Giménez works in a colorful, crisp geometry. Her forms resemble paper cut outs or children’s blocks that float in loose constellations against bright backgrounds, never quite coalescing into a single, solid structure. Giménez’s show Disarming Convention at the Fundación Centro Internacional de la Estampa Contemporánea featured the artist’s screen prints, an orderly though no less exploratory alternative to the large-scale paintings and installations she is best known for. Her pictures seem to move and jostle, gathering and unravelling into playful configurations that make us wonder: are these shapes, symbols, or something else entirely?

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Born in 1972 in Addis Ababa, Bete immigrated to the United States with her family at age 10 to escape conflict in her home country. She earned her BA in History and Literature of the African Diaspora from the University of Texas at Austin in 1995, and completed an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. Her outstanding art practice, which spanned video, photography, installation, public art, and text, was recognized with a Tito’s Prize in 2019, a residency at Artpace in 2022, and in numerous exhibitions in Texas and beyond.

Along with her art practice, Bete was also a curator of Fusebox Festival, co-editor of Written and Spoken, co-founder of Black Mountain Project, co-organizer of the Addis Video Art Festival, and alumna of ICOSA Collective. As is evident from this expansive list of shared and public-facing projects, Bete was deeply invested in collaboration and community building. She was curious about the world and about ideas, and her art and advocacy work were reflective of this vitality and rigor. Bete’s recent public art projects were a perfect venue for her work, which — like the artist herself — was open, experimental, and profound. Though the artist’s poetic practice took many forms, her concerns were ultimately linked to the real world and its problems, and to a heartfelt quest for positive change.

I first met Bete in early 2015 when we both served as artist-mentors in The Contemporary Austin’s Young Artists program. Later, I’d meet up with the artist for Portuguese language practice — Bete had lived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for 10 years — and for fascinating studio visits that made me feel fortunate to be in her exhilarating orbit. Conversations with Bete were intellectual, warm, lively, and full of possibility; it’s rare to find someone who is so gifted and giving.

In 2020, Bete and her long-time collaborator Adrian Aguilera opened people the We, a thoughtful and very timely exhibition at Prizer Arts and Letters in Austin. I wrote about the show for Frieze, and I also conducted an interview with the artists for the now-defunct publication Sightlines. In honor of Bete, I’m sharing passages from those two pieces here.

From my review for Frieze:

“In Aguilera’s video Soy loco por ti, América (I’m Crazy about You, America), Caetano Veloso’s eponymous 1968 song plays as the artist performs a ghostly dance while wrapped in a green-screen shroud. Sung in both Spanish and Portuguese, the Brazilian song pays tribute to the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara and the Cuban poet José Martí. The song’s pan-American, cross-language ethos mirrors the artists’ own experience: Aguilera is from Mexico; Makonnen is Ethiopian, but lived in Brazil for a decade before relocating to Austin. As immigrants, the artists view America as a malleable entity, one they can insert themselves into in the form of new flags made from green screens or sticks and stones. But the use of the word América in this piece and in untitled (+500 years in américa) – where it’s printed against a reflective, black background – are a reminder of their positionality outside of it, too.”

And finally, Bete’s inspiring words about the future of the US from our Sightlines interview:

“We need a difference or else it’s just the same old shit over and over again. We keep hearing about this pandemic exhaustion. The normal wasn’t good; normal was a problem. Normal wasn’t working. That is not what the uprisings were about. (The hope I have is) that some kind of change happens, and we commit to a future that is a future for everyone in this country ... No matter what, we will continue, we will be here, we will be alright. But it’s an opportunity to commit to the ideals that we believe in: the possibility to move in the direction of fulfilling the potential, the amazing project that this country is.”

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I immediately wanted to see María Lara: The Slowness of Light at CentroCentro when I read that the artist rarely shows her work in public. The exhibition features some 40 paintings and drawings from the past 25 years of Lara’s career, all radiating lush sunrise and sunset colors. Born in Loja, Granada, in 1940 and based in Madrid since the 1970s, Lara is married to the Japanese artist Mitsuo Miura, who also works in an unapologetically joyful mode of abstraction. (I’d love to visit their studios someday!) The show opens with the artist’s thoughtful statement about how her artworks and mood shift with the sun’s movement throughout the day, and my only regret about this installation was its lack of natural light on the surface of these luminous pieces.

Carmen Laffón: Variations at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional is the first major exhibition devoted to the artist since her death at age 87 in 2021. The Andalusian artist was best known for her hazy, pastel-hued paintings, but I was most drawn to her life-size bronze sculptures — which reproduce everyday objects around her home and studio — and her massive drawings, where Laffón’s soft touch really sings. The show’s last gallery featured a fascinating final body of work that felt like a new direction. These massive, mostly-white paintings of the salt marshes on the southern coast of Spain seemed more solid than what she’d previously set to canvas.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Sweet Revenge at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía was a beautiful but odd experience. I snapped these photos in rare moments when the galleries weren’t mobbed with visitors talking loudly on their phones or posing for selfies with the artist’s beaded curtains and mirror pieces. In the show’s wall texts, I read that Gonzalez-Torres thought that audience participation was necessary for his works to function, and part of me thought he would have loved the carnivalesque, care free feeling all around. But it felt strange to be so moved by the artist and his work (Gonzalez-Torres died of AIDS at age 38 in 1996) in a space where so many others seemed unaffected by the exhibition’s ethereal sobriety. Yet Gonzalez-Torres cared about the full spectrum of life, so perhaps it’s right to experience him in this way.

I was blown away by Aurèlia Muñoz: Beings at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. This expansive retrospective celebrates the hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth in more than 150 artworks that span a staggering array of methods and materials, including tapestry, drawing, collage, fiber sculpture, and hand made paper. Muñoz was ambitious and innovative, finding inspiration in ancient and international sources but producing utterly unique and modern artworks. In addition to stunning final pieces, the show also includes vital archival material like sketches and maquettes that illuminate Muñoz’s meticulous process. Beings will travel to Barcelona this fall.

Mitologías modernas: Ouka Leele & Co at Sala Alcalá 31 is a lively celebration of the artists of Madrid in the 1980s. Works by Ouka Leele (Bárbara Allende Gil de Biedma), El Hortelano (José Alfonso Morera Ortiz), Ceesepe (Carlos Sánchez Pérez), Carlos Franco, Sigfrido Martin Begué, and others are vibrant relics of La Movida Madrileña, a transformative and transgressive countercultural moment based in the capital that spread across the country after the end of Spanish dictatorship. At a time when minimalistic and conceptual art still mostly reigns supreme in the Spanish contemporary art scene, these colorful, figurative, sensual, narrative, art historically-rooted and heavily painting-based artworks feel especially refreshing and rebellious.

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On the sunny day I visited the house, a calico cat greeted me in the cool, dark entrance where I removed my shoes. A handful of people drifted around the quiet rooms, which are organized around a central Japanese-style hearth. Elegant shoji screens, dark wood beams, and tatami mats form the backdrop of a small selection of unique ceramics, sculptures, and furniture made by the artist. Past a bright courtyard is Kawai’s studio and noborigama. This traditional multichamber climbing kiln once belonged to the master potter Kiyomizu Rokubei V (1875-1959), who the artist worked with before launching his own career. Kawai once said that he only surrounded himself with things he loved, and that sense of thoughtful care is apparent all around. Throughout the house — which was made into a free public museum in 1973 — a feeling of calming beauty pervades every space, tool, and object.

Kawai was born in the port town of Yasugi, Shimane prefecture in 1890. His father was a carpenter, but as the second son he had the freedom to choose ceramics as his path instead. The artist studied first in Tokyo, where he met his close friend and fellow prominent ceramicist Hamada Shoji (1894-1978), and later in Kyoto, where he specialized in making glazes. Kawai’s first body of work was made in the style of ancient Chinese ceramics, and won him wide recognition and success. However, meeting the philosopher Yanagi Sōetsu introduced him to new influences including English slipware and Mokujiki Shōnin’s (1718-1810) lively Buddhist sculptures. These alternative modes of creativity inspired Kawai to take another direction in his work.

The change coincided with the emergence of the mingei movement, which the artist forged together with Hamada, Yanagi, and others. At a time of rapid modernization, automation, and Westernization, their goal was “to focus on the perfect beauty present in everyday sundries — regional crafts born out of techniques and skills passed down from generation to generation — that no one was paying attention to,” writes Sagi Tamae, Kawai’s granddaughter and the longtime curator of the artist’s house museum. Accordingly, he shifted his way of working. Kawai stopped signing his creations and focused on making durable, functional things that possessed what he called yō no bi, or the subtle but essential value inherent in daily use. “He felt it was enough if artworks quietly exist with their beauty in people’s lives,” Sagi explains.

The artist’s humble worldview also shaped his attitude towards awards and honors, and he even turned down the prestigious title of Living National Treasure and Order of Culture medals. “His reason for doing so was that it was nonsense for a human being to rank another human being,” Sagi says. Kawai also thought that “He was not the sole person who should receive all the credit for his work. He felt that his work was only possible thanks to the many people who helped him, including those who procured clay for him, brought firewood from the mountains for him, and the artisans who fired his climbing kiln for him. He also felt blessed by nature for the clay, water, wood and fire it provided him.”

This total and holistic understanding of all that goes into an artwork is apparent in Kawai’s exceptionally intentional and beautiful living space. Kawai designed the home in 1937 and hired his brother, now a master carpenter, to build it using natural materials and traditional methods. During World War II, the artist had to stop working in ceramics because the light and smoke from his kiln — which burned for three days and nights when in production — could attract dangerous attention and air raids. While he waited for the conflict to end, Kawai read, wrote, and thought extensively about the next stage in his work. He later continued working with clay, but also turned to calligraphy, wood carving, designing furniture, and even making a remarkably inventive set of smoking pipes.

Shortly before his death in 1966 at age 76, Kawai wrote the following poem:

Inexhaustible feast

Life held up by innumerable supports

Life treading upon time

We who, if we reflect, receive hospitality from all things

We who are invited as guests in this world

More things can be seen

A feast of more than one can eat

If this is not paradise,

Where is the Pure Land?

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Hockney was born in the northern English city of Bradford in 1937, and later lived and worked between the United Kingdom, United States, and France. The BBC broadcaster Melvyn Bragg once said that the painter “has been famous, more or less continuously, since he left art school,” and Hockney is perhaps today’s closest thing to Pablo Picasso in terms of name recognition and notoriety. Prolific and chameleon-like, he worked in a staggering range of media including painting, drawing, set design, textiles, paper making, printmaking, video, animation, and collage.

The art historian Martin Gayford published a brilliant (and highly recommendable) book on the artist in 2021 called Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. Speaking from the depths of the pandemic, Hockney’s ever-enthusiastic voice rings out: “I have to paint. I’ve always wanted to paint; I’ve always wanted to make pictures from when I was tiny. That’s my job I think, making pictures, and I’ve gone on doing it for sixty years. I’m still doing it, and I think they are still interesting as well. The world is very, very beautiful if you look at it, but most people don’t look very much, with an intensity, do they? I do.”

Hockney always comes off as charmingly warm and casual in the videos I’ve seen of him over the years, but he was also a fearless pathbreaker on a personal and artistic level. He came out as gay and made art depicting gay love when sexual acts between men were still criminalized in Britain, and later used sales of his works to fund causes related to HIV/AIDS. During his early career, abstraction, minimalism, and other cerebral art movements dominated the scene, but Hockney forged ahead with a punchy, unorthodox form of figuration that expanded — and pushed — traditional portrait and landscape painting into new territory. And perhaps most surprisingly, he bravely dove headfirst into new technologies, using fax machines, email, and digital imaging apps to create. The iPad drawings that Hockney made in the last 15 years of his life are unexpectedly beautiful, and a clear example of how the artist could create something sublime with whatever he had at hand.

A Bigger Splash, Hockney’s iconic 1967 canvas capturing the pleasures of a pool in the California sun, is probably still the artist’s best-known work. But my favorite era is his later life, when Hockney returned to his native Yorkshire and began painting the countryside en plein air. These vibrant pictures — many of them wall-sized and spread over several canvases — still transmit his irrepressible joie de vivre, but are now rooted in careful observation. Here we see the artist really looking at nature, weather, light, and the changing seasons much like his predecessor John Constable did in Suffolk two centuries earlier. In old age, Hockney was increasingly interested in what he could see and represent. As he told Gayford, “You notice more with each successive year.”

This emphasis on drawing from life reminds me of my recent conversations with Diana Aitchison and Chloe Briggs, other artists from the UK who ground their practices in really looking at their subjects and surroundings. Even at a smaller scale, Hockney was fixated on the transformative nature of truly noticing while drawing, as he explains to Gayford: “Each time I do a still life, I get very excited and realize that there are a thousand things here I can see! Which of them shall I choose? The more I look and think about it, the more I see. These simple things are unbelievably rich. A lot of people have forgotten that. But you can remind them.”

Seeing Hockney’s beautiful drawings of nature inspired me to take up my sketchbook during the pandemic and draw things around my house. I began sketching like this again last spring, and am sharing a few pages from these notebooks here:

I’m encouraged by Hockney’s example, and would love to see more and draw more of the world I experience everyday. Hey, maybe drawing will give me a longer life, too. As Hockney told Gayford, “Painters can live a long time. They either die young or make it to ripe old ages like Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, or my old friend Gillian Ayres. Do you know why? Because when you are painting, you’re so involved you can get out of yourself. Well, if you can do that, that’s added time.”

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On my visit, Tamara took me to the basement of the building where the paper is made. Below the building moving water from a stream powers the impressive old wooden and metal machines that used to operate ceaselessly as the mill churned out cigarette paper and other paper products that were sold all over Spain and the American colonies. At one point Tamara activated the machines and told me that the mill’s women workers used to sing to the rhythm of their mechanical pounding and swinging. I also got to see the large wooden paper presses and the finely-woven molds that papermakers use to create individual sheets, some of which are adorned with charming historical watermarks.

When Tamara came to Galicia this spring, she brought paper that she’d made for me by hand at the mill. I’ve really enjoyed painting on this special paper, and this week more of it has arrived by mail. To celebrate, I’m sharing some images from my visit to Capellades late last year.

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One of the ways Lamas keeps us guessing is through her uniquely unfixed position on figuration and abstraction. Her deftly-layered canvases constantly and skillfully push the fickle edge between the two modes, never quite committing to one to the exclusion of the other. The artist applies large swaths of paint and pattern, but there’s almost always a human element — the outline of a figure’s torso or a single outstretched hand — that ties these bold experiments in shape and color to something deeper. In Lamas’s paintings, signs of anatomy are often life-sized, female (perhaps tracings of the artist’s own shadow), and appear to be transferred to the canvas with a kind of stencil or stamp, suggesting that the artist quite literally drops her body and her ‘self’ into her work.

Lamas was born in Vigo, Galicia in 1954. After studying graphic design in Madrid, she was part of the avant-garde group Colectivo da Imaxe with her partner Antón Patriño, Jorge Agra, and Carlos Berride. She later cofounded the influential Grupo Atlántica in Vigo in 1980 alongside Patiño, Guillermo Monroy, and Ánxel Huete. Her exhibition Espiral da Cor (Color Spiral) in Vilagarcía de Arousa features a number of massive paintings that practically vibrate off the walls.

What draws me most to Lamas is the sheer joy and conviction of her paintings. The gallerist Luisa Pita explains that the artist’s unhesitating execution shows us “that they were created with absolute freedom, giving free rein to her deepest emotions through the painterly gesture and the use of color. This combination of freedom and sincerity, of approaching the work with absolute certainty, reveals an artist who embodies the importance of one’s own journey in the relentless pursuit of progress and evolution in creative work.”

The paintings seem to spring directly from the artist’s inner voice with an uncommon urgency. As Lamas herself notes in a 2024 interview, “Painting with the body is painting first with the mind, when you have that initial idea, that desire to do something you’ve dreamed of but can’t quite grasp. And then it’s developing it in a more passionate way, without so much reflection.” For the artist, there’s no room to pause or wait.

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Aitchision was born in Culross, Scotland in 1953 and studied art in Norfolk and London. After a time in France, Italy, and the Netherlands, she moved to Galicia, Spain with her husband and fellow artist Tim Behrens in 1987. Since the beginning, she has preferred to make art outside of the confines of a traditional studio, often taking drawing to unexpected places. As a teenager, Aitchison drew the countryside near Norwich, and as an adult she set up a workspace in an active horse stable where she sketched the animals from life.

Drawing is at the root of the artist’s experimental printmaking practice, too. Aitchison is by far the most inventive printmaker I know. Equally brave and unorthodox, she pushes her work into new territory by tirelessly retooling her printmaking plates, colors, and papers. Aitchison’s images are always in transformation, yet they possess a rare grace and stillness that’s beautiful to look at and hard to describe.

She has developed her practice since the 1990s at the Centro Internacional de la Estampa Contemporánea (International Center of Contemporary Printmaking, or Fundación CIEC) in Betanzos. I first met her there in 2019, and we frequently see each other after she’s spent the morning working on her prints. This is our recent conversation about the necessity of looking and drawing, themes that animate so much of how and why Aitchison makes art.

Lauren Moya Ford: When I see your work, the word graceful comes to mind because of the elegant way you move between representing what is seen and what is remembered or felt. You balance both observation and memory so delicately.

Diana Aitchison: Well, I think a lot of people are doing a lot of abstract work and therapy art these days, and some say that I’m kind of old fashioned in the way I’m drawing landscapes, people, and horses. Artists aren’t depicting subjects like that anymore. They’re doing something out of their head.

LMF: But I feel like that also has to do with the difference between more recent Spanish art and art from England or the United Kingdom, where there’s this tradition of representation and a connection to the land, representation, and figure.

DA: Maybe because of [J.M.W.] Turner and [John] Constable. But I remember when I left art school I was watching what was happening in the art schools and they just completely stopped teaching drawing. Now they’ve gone back to it.

I think it’s very useful to draw because it trains your eye and your memory. People are using cameras these days, and the camera has its own eye. It’s completely different. If you look at old paintings of portraits of people, they’re fantastic. And for some reason nowadays people think that it’s better to take a photograph and then work from that. But that’s the camera; it’s not your eye.

If I did a picture of you and somebody else did one, they’d be completely different. But with a camera it’s going to be exactly the same. So why are people frightened of drawing a real person?

LMF: Drawing — especially when it comes to portraiture — is so intimate and direct. It’s almost a confrontation. But if you have the photograph or the screen of the phone as an intermediary, there’s a sort of shelter the artist can hide behind, or at least a layer of insulation. If the drawing doesn’t turn out exactly like the sitter, it came from the photo, not from the artist.

DA: I never did modeling, but I had to sit for my husband many times and I hated it. I wasn’t very good at it. But some people are good at it, and I think if I had learned how to sort of meditate a bit, I could have done it better.

LMF: It’s a vulnerable act on both sides. For the model, you have to be vulnerable enough to be open to interpretation because someone is taking your image and making what they will of it. There’s often a lot injected into that representation, especially if the artist knows you personally.

DA: It’s fun drawing people, actually. Sometimes I ask students here [at the Fundación CIEC] to sit for me. I don’t do it for long because you just take a few notes and then draw with your memory; you try and do it again on your own. It’s quite interesting what you can remember.

LMF: Yeah. Because drawing isn’t just training your hand, it’s also training your eye to do something that it doesn’t always do.

DA: It does. I notice that after I work on a print or drawing, when I walk along the street or drive in the car my eye is so much sharper; you just see things. That’s why I believe in actually doing the drawing rather than using a camera. I’ve never used a camera.

LMF: I think in general, our world is so fast and things are so easily accessible with the phone that if you see something impressive, you can take a snapshot and think to yourself, I’ll look at it more later, I’ll research that later. And so you don’t stay with it in the moment and really study it with your eye or your perception in general. But when you’re drawing something in front of you, you spend so much time with what you’re looking at that it starts to reveal new details of itself to you, things you wouldn’t see in a cursory, quick glance.

In your exhibition, many of the pictures were of large landscape scenes. I think the closest view was in your pictures of horses, but for the most part the works on display were images of places that were farther away that you witnessed as you were traveling. But your work also depicts places that are remembered, right? Do you sometimes work from the memory of what a certain place looked like?

DA: I draw things far away and near. But yes, I do sometimes work from memory, especially of places in England that I know very well. If I go back nowadays, I may go out and draw one of those places again. And then I bring the drawing here [to the CIEC] and make a print. I can’t usually make up things, though I have done it a couple of times.

LMF: That idea of returning to a place that you know well and drawing it again and again through time reminds me of the way that you rework the same printmaking plate, altering it, trying different colors, papers, and marks. In a way, you’re also revisiting or returning to a place through that process.

You usually do a limited edition of 3 to 5 prints with the same plate, inking method, and paper. Then you often use that same plate to experiment with different papers and inks, and you might also continue to work on the plate itself, right?

DA: Definitely. And then I print it and see. Sometimes I make a mistake and go too far and I can’t go back; it’s quite difficult to go back on a plate. But it’s not really a mistake. I just have to carry on. The one I’m doing right now has gone back and forward as I worked on it. I printed it in dark green, and then today as I was driving here this morning I thought, I’m going to print it in bright yellow green, and it has come out okay. I’m pleased with it.

I rely a lot on instinct. You try something, and it works. I mean, you just never know. It’s very much instinct work: Try that. Go for it.

LMF: You’re very experimental, much more so than a lot of artists — especially a lot of printmakers — because you’re willing to try an image in so many different ways, and you often keep reworking the plate over the course of days or even years.

DA: Well, I think I’m more of a painter than a printmaker. I mean, I don’t really want to make big editions. It’s quite a bore having to print so many out, and you get tempted when you’re printing the same thing over and over. You want to change it. You can’t help it.

LMF: Is that impulse the painter in you?

DA: Yes, I think so.

LMF: Because I would think that a typical printmaker would be all about keeping all their prints exactly alike.

DA: I like moving on and changing it a bit. But what’s so great about printmaking: if you do a drawing, the only way to change it is to get a rubber to alter and add things. But if you make a print — a drypoint or any other method — and you want to change it, you can, but then you’ve still got the original. So you can go on and on and keep changing it. I find that really fun.

LMF: So for you, it’s infinite and generative. A drawing on a single sheet of paper can’t necessarily sustain that amount of variation, but with printmaking you have the plate, and it gives you the ability to keep working.

Speaking of experimenting, how do you decide whether you want to work with a wood plate versus a copper plate versus another material?

DA: It’s all on instinct. If I see a piece of wood I like, I think, I’ll try something on there. But I have no idea what I’m going to do.

LMF: So the plate itself leads you.

DA: Yes it does. But I don’t usually start unless I’ve got a drawing I’m going to work from. To do a big print, you have to be fairly sure that it’s going to survive being big, because sometimes small things really work, and if you make a very small thing into a big size, it often doesn’t work. But my instinct is my dilemma as well. Because you can’t always rely on it. You have to be very aware of it.

LMF: And not let yourself be too cautious.

DA: But you see, doubt is very important, because if you have doubt it’s because you want to move on. So if you’re stuck with doubt, you have to push yourself, even if you don’t want to.

LMF: That makes me think about the way that your plates are such active sites of work. What’s it like when you return sometimes to the same plate, maybe months or years later?

DA: I’ve done that, yes, but rather reluctantly. Because when I come back to it after some time has passed I often find that it’s done, and there’s not really more to do. I really prefer something new; I like new ground.

LMF: How do you know when you’re done making different iterations of a plate?

DA: Well, you just get it when you’ve done it so often. You just feel it’s exhausted its possibilities.

LMF: Your curiosity has been sated about what that plate can do.

DA: I think so. But I do really like drawing and working from a drawing that comes from a memory of a place. I mean, when you’re coming down from A Coruña into Betanzos and you see the river going out to the sea, that view changes every day. The water changes, the sky changes, the mountains, the hills, everything. Every day I see that landscape. I’ve made hundreds of pictures of it. There were a couple in the exhibition, but I’ve made hundreds and hundreds. Because it’s just so lovely. It’s a lovely view, and it always gives you this lovely feeling. In Spain, I’ve often made images there.

LMF: So rather than memorizing the scenery, you’re experiencing it afresh each time?

DA: Yes. And I will do it again. I never get bored of that.

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Although many have wondered what could have become of Monroy if he had lived longer, the organizer of a recent exhibition at the Fundación Luis Seoane in A Coruña suggests that the artist had already hit his stride. “Nothing is missing,” curator Ángel Cerviño told a local newspaper in December 2025. “Despite dying very young, [Monroy] left behind a complete and mature body of work.” Indeed, the approximately 40 drawings and paintings in Aquí e Agora display a rare vibrance. Rather than conveying a sense of lack or loss about a tragic past or an unfulfilled future, Monroy’s pieces keep us squarely in the present moment, holding our attention in the here and now.

Born in Vigo, Spain in 1954, the artist studied economics at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela before starting to exhibit his paintings in the mid-1970s. Monroy visited Paris and completed his mandatory military service in Madrid before returning to his hometown, which by then was a booming urban and industrial center. He kept a studio outside of the city that became a key meeting point in the Galician art scene at the time. Shortly before his death, Monroy founded Grupo Atlántica with fellow Vigo artists Menchu Lamas, Antón Patiño, and Ánxel Huete, and was close with colleagues in La Galga, another artist group based in Coruña including Correa Corredoira, Mon Vasco, and others.

Monroy’s unruly abstractions are clearly indebted to edgy AbEx figures like Willem de Kooning, but his bright palette, graceful brushwork, and window-like compositions also evoke the lyrical influences of Raoul Dufy and Henri Matisse. His cardboard works are painted on large, found pieces of product packaging and have a curious and compelling sense of heft and dimension. . These pieces reminded me of Abraham Ángel, a promising Mexican painter who also painted on cardboard and who also lost his life tragically early. On paper, Monroy’s quick marks often coalesce into what appear to be loose, cloudless sea views. The artist came from Galicia’s biggest coastal city, and also one of its sunnier corners; these brushy sketches on paper seem ready to float on air.

Air, light, and water are all elements that are hard to contain, like the artist’s spirit. As Monroy once said, “I’m a painter, more than anything, because I’m interested in being free and painting for me is the most palpable manifestation of my life’s journey.”

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Admittedly there has been a push in recent years to spotlight the work of Spain’s exceptional but under-recognized women artists; I myself have reviewed major exhibitions in some of the country’s most prestigious institutions of Maruja Mallo, Isabel Quintanilla, and Delhy Tejero, among others. Progress has been made, and recent and upcoming retrospectives on pioneering artists like Marisa González and Aurèlia Muñoz show ongoing efforts to recover and highlight the work of Spanish women artists. Yet countless others remain largely hidden from view.

So what to do about such pervasive, systemic inequality? If you’re Cendán, you organize an exhibition. Outras Historias Posibles (Other Possible Histories) at the Sede Afundación in A Coruña features six women artists born in the 1950s who built dynamic art practices despite significant professional and social obstacles. The show offers a celebration of their work while firmly insisting that viewers reckon with the conditions that have kept their art from wider acclaim.

Ana García Pan, Emilia Guimeráns, Anne Heyvaert, Tusi Sandoval, Blanca Silva, and Laura Terré all began their careers in the late 1970s and 80s. It was a time of great cultural possibility and rejuvenation in Spain that is perhaps best exemplified by the Movida Madrileña, among other alternative currents. Despite the moment’s radical rejection of so much about the oppressive previous decades, the Spanish art ecosystem didn’t always embrace the work of women artists. These barriers came from long standing, entrenched social values. As the American art historian Linda Nochlin noted in her influential and provocatively-titled 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” “Art is not a free and autonomous activity of a gifted individual, but takes place in a social situation, mediated by specific and definable situations, be they academic, artistic, patronage systems, etc.”

Cendán argues that the resistance that Spanish women artists faced at the time reflected a wider society that was slow to change. “We must not forget that in the 1980s the burden of Francoism was still very much present in the mentality of most Spaniards, who had been indoctrinated by an anachronistic system that prioritized the model of a woman whose ultimate goal was the home, motherhood, and economic dependence on their husbands,” she explains. This widespread mindset led to a perception that women artists were, as curator Isabel Tejeda says, “eternal amateurs” who would never be able to reach the heights of their male counterparts. Cendán’s project aims to shed light on a group of women artists who emerged in the 1970s and 80s but haven’t been given their due.

Silva’s paintings present a schism in form. The exhibition shows the artist’s move from emotionally-charged portraits of solitary women in the 1980s and 90s to lush, large-scale abstractions from the late 90s onwards. In her early works, Silva explores women’s bodies as a powerful locus of psychological complexity; Cendán writes that the artist is “representing them not as objects of desire, but as excuses to pose uncomfortable questions.” Her later works leave the figure behind completely, though they’re worlds away from the stark, often sterile abstract painting that is still so popular in Spanish art today. Both bodies of Silva’s work are united by vibrant color and a sense of profound emotion.

Heyvaert is the only featured artist in the exhibition who was not born in Galicia, though she has spent most of her adult life there. Born in the United States in 1959, she grew up in France and studied art in Paris in the late 1970s and early 80s. Afterwards, Heyvaert lived in Spain and Luxembourg before finally settling in Oleiros, Galicia, an itinerancy alluded to in her exquisite trompe l’oeil paintings of maps. Cendán makes an incisive connection in the catalog between the artist’s work and that of her father, architect and conceptual artist René Heyvaert (1929-1984), asserting that the sobriety of her cardboard box and empty interior series relates to the elder Heyvaert’s ambition to, in his words, “captivate with little.” I visited the artist’s bright attic studio last year.

Guimeráns’s work is strikingly diverse, ranging from her colorful and experimental Tubarros series (1993-2002) to the more introspective Domestic (2009), an installation in which delicate porcelain garments on a clothesline suggest elements of personal history, care, and loss. Today the field of ceramics is seeing a resurgence in prestige and popularity, but in the 1980s and 90s when the artist emerged, “its perception [was] as a minor artistic practice whose scope was limited to specific circuits on the fringes of art institutions,” Cendán writes. Despite this, Guimeráns remains resolved and grounded in her practice: “Whether or not my career as an artist is in the place it deserves is not something that worries me,” she tells the curator. “Having a place or no place, I don’t care. I live and try to do my best.”

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Okamoto is best known for the Tower of the Sun, an uncanny 70-meter-tall monument that he created for the 1970 Japan World Exposition in Osaka (also known as Expo ‘70). From the late 1940s until his death at age 84 in 1996, he was a singular and powerful creative force in Japan. His vibrant, abstract style can be seen in the many large-scale murals and monuments that the artist completed for train and subway stations, museums, parks, shopping complexes, public baths, government buildings, and other sites across Japan. Okamoto also designed numerous books, magazines, tableware, theater sets, costumes, and furniture in addition to his experimental sculptures and paintings. But perhaps the artist’s most daring and expansive artwork was the one he created from a helicopter in Tokyo on a night in August 1955.

Later Okamoto described his ephemeral piece Painting the Night Sky by Helicopter this way: “We floated up into the night sky from Tamagawa Airport, passing over numerous waves of light until finally we arrived, drifting over the Ginza district where the lights seemed brighter than everywhere else. Looking down, we could see crowds of people walking around ... On any other night, I would be one of them, moving from bar to bar, I thought then focused on my main objective. Putting my faith in the skill of the pilot sitting next to me, Mr. Ozeki, I started to give directions according to the image I had in my head, ‘Right! Right! Go down! Go up! A little farther forward!’ shouting above the noise of the engine until my voice became hoarse. Later, when I saw the photographs that were taken from the roof of the Yomiuri Newspaper Building, I thought, ‘Not bad,’ and smiled in satisfaction, but then I realized! I had forgotten the signature! However, at the time, that had been the last thing on my mind.”

Okamoto was also a prolific writer, publishing books and newspaper articles about contemporary art and national history. The artist lived in Paris during the 1920s and 30s, where he studied at the Sorbonne and joined the avant-garde art scene. But after returning to Japan, he became interested in his country’s cultural roots, and travelled extensively documenting traditional customs and lifeways. The artist was especially inspired by the dynamic pottery of the Jōmon people. In his 1956 book Japanese Tradition, he writes that this ancient pottery “represents not only the discovery of Japan but also the discovery of myself.”

The house in Aoyama — now a museum that preserves Okamoto’s studio, garden, and artworks — was the artist’s home and workplace from 1954 until his death. But actually, the artist had an even longer history here. His family lived on this plot of land before their home was bombed during World War II. Okamoto was a prisoner of war in China at the time, and all of his previous work was destroyed in the attack. So when he created this place, it was both a forward-looking and deeply personal project. Here are some photos from my visit to the house museum in April 2024.

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The professors and students continued to collaborate and by 1970 the Rebel Chicano Art Front was born. From the beginning, the group’s ethos was based in activism with a subversive sense of humor, hence its tongue-in-cheek name change to the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) shortly after the group was formed. With its vibrant posters and far-reaching community advocacy, the RCAF became one of the Chicano Movement’s most influential and long-lived art collectives.

The Chicano Movement arose among people of Mexican descent in the United States during the 1960s and 70s as a response to a variety of urgent concerns, including educational segregation and inequality, racial prejudice, the brutal working conditions of farmworkers, and the disproportionately high fatality rates of Mexican Americans in the Vietnam War. Artists like Montoya, Villa, and their colleagues were an active part of the cause. They used their talents to forge a new kind of visual identity for their culture, and to spread the movement’s message in innovative ways.

For many Chicanos, this meant creating posters in shared screen printing shops and art spaces. Often more cost-effective to produce than other types of art, the multi-step process behind making posters also invited collaboration with others. Moreover, posters were printed in editions of multiples, making them relatively easy to install in public spaces and disseminate among the community. Posters became a dynamic mode of aesthetic and conceptual experimentation for many artists, and an effective way to spread the word about La Causa. As members of the Chicano Movement, Montoya said, “Artists had their mandate to pictorialize the struggle ... and the posters were our newsletter.”

Nearly 100 of these posters are currently on view in Rebels with La Causa: Royal Chicano Air Force Art and Activism, 1970-1990 at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. The largest exhibition ever staged about the RCAF features the group’s artworks along with photos, ephemera, and video documentation across their twenty-year history. I’ve been interested in the RCAF for years, especially the work of Luis “Louie the Foot” González, and the museum kindly sent me a copy of the show’s catalog, which features beautiful illustrations and excellent essays about the group and its far-reaching artistic and social work.

Before the Chicano Movement, posters hadn’t typically been considered fine artworks. But the conventions of the mainstream art world in the US often excluded Chicano artists anyway, and the usual routes to gallery representation and institutional support were nearly impossible to reach. Accordingly, many Chicanos rejected the ways of the dominant art culture, looking to Mexican artists José Guadalupe Posada and Diego Rivera for inspiration, and working with alternative methods like printmaking instead. Chicano artists also often preferred collective creation over individual authorship, and catered to their communities rather than to collectors. “The art I was dedicated to doing and am doing is for the good of community building and for the betterment of the human condition, not to enhance my life,” RCAF member Stan Padilla said in a 2015 interview.

The group is best known today for its eye-catching posters, which often blend community and commercial themes. The RCAF produced artistic pieces featuring poetry and experimental techniques alongside posters for low rider car shows, neighborhood dances, and political campaigns. As Chon Noriega argues, the RCAF’s singular posters exist “somewhere between a unique art object and mass media.” Each one contains signifiers of the movement: its symbols and values are embedded in the picture space of each poster.

But the RCAF was far more than an art club. By 1972, the group had moved off campus to Southside Park and established their nonprofit, the Centro de Artistas Chicanos, which included local musicians, actors, dancers, mental health professionals, and activists. The RCAF expanded to encompass the Breakfast for Niños program (based on the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast for Children), Barrio Arts Program, and La Raza Bookstore (later known as La Raza Galeria Posada).

The group also orchestrated yearly ceremonias (public events and parades celebrating Mexican culture) and was heavily involved with the United Farm Workers in the Sacramento Valley. Because of its diverse and dynamic organizing, as well as its deep ties to the community, the scholar and curator Terezita Romo calls the RCAF “a multidimensional group fomenting a cultural renaissance and fostering political activism.” More than 50 years after the group’s founding, its rebellious, collaborative, creative, and community-driven spirit serves as an important model to artists and activists today.

Rebels with La Causa: Royal Chicano Air Force Art and Activism, 1970-1990 is on view at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California through June 28, 2026.

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As the Society’s Curator of Photography, Anderson went on to do several more extended photographic research trips across Spain. Though her goal was to document the country as a whole, nearly 40% of the roughly 14,000 photos she ultimately made were taken in Galicia, a place that her employer and Hispanic Society founder Archer Milton Huntington also viewed as an especially authentic part of Spain.

Anderson’s pictures capture the breadth of the region’s social and physical landscape, from its historic cathedrals to its humble farmhouses, as well as scenes of daily life and labor in the form of markets, processions, and festivals. “The photographs record a world now irretrievably lost,” writes scholar Patrick Lenaghan.

Unlike many of her American and British predecessors, Anderson knew Spanish and spoke passable Galician, which gave her better access to and understanding of her subjects. “A human element pervades her images,” Lenagham affirms, and that sentiment echoes in the photographer’s own memory of her first trip: “It was mainly on the patience and good will of the Spanish people, we realized, that we should be dependent for the success of our work,” she writes.

The young American was an intrepid traveller. “Comfort bores me” was her motto, and she navigated challenges like adverse weather and flea-infested inns with aplomb. Though Anderson's later trips to Spain were undertaken with fellow Hispanic Society photographer Frances Spalding, her father Alfred Theodore Anderson gamely left his wife and professional photography studio in Kearney, Nebraska to join his daughter on her first transatlantic journey.

Alfred Anderson provided substantial technical and emotional support, and kept a charming diary during the trip that sheds light on some of the pair’s most exciting adventures. For example, on November 10, 1924, he writes about their unlikely trip to Santiago de Compostela on the roof of a jam-packed rural bus: “[It] was filled with bundles covered with canvas and on this I found a place to lie down quite comfortably and a rope to hold on to so that I would not be jarred off when the bus swung from side to side,” he notes with good humor.

Anderson also kept track of her project in writing. On one of their most serendipitous encounters, she and her father came upon a young Ramón Caamaño in Muxía, a seaside town on Galicia’s Costa da Morte. She describes Caamaño — who went on to become a professional photographer and documentarian himself — as “a breathless lad of fourteen, an ardent photographer yearning for conversation with a fellow craftsman.”

In a way, Caamaño’s energetic interest in modern technology represented new currents in the region. Galician life was long based on agriculture and fishing — some 2/3 of the population worked in these sectors when Anderson arrived — but the region “saw more [economic] growth in the 1920s than the whole century before combined,” writes historian Ramón Villares. Much of this growth was propelled by industrialization, and by remittances sent from Latin America, where countless young Galician men had sought their fortunes since the 19th century.

These men’s absence is palpable in Anderson’s photographs of women (and children) working in fishing, farming, and other highly physical jobs that were previously assigned to men. Her focus on these ‘viudas de vivos’ (‘widows of the living’) has made Anderson’s work not just an important record of a historical moment in time, but also a sort of feminist testament to the strength of Galician women. “Many of Ruth Anderson’s photos show a society in transition,” Villares says.

When I went through a book of Anderson's photos recently, I kept hoping that I might find my husband’s ancestors in the pictures (Fran has Galician heritage on both sides of his family). Sure enough, I soon found photos of the Confitería Guillermo del Valle, a bakery founded in Sada, Galicia in 1921 by Fran’s great-grandfather. In Anderson’s photo of the shop’s front window (see above), Fran’s great-grandparents are just barely visible. My mother-in-law Mercedes Vicente (who is also a brilliant artist) told me that Fran’s great-grandmother was pregnant with his grandmother Nieves when the photo was taken. Years later, Nieves was working in this same bakery when she met Fran’s grandfather for the first time. Over the course of her travels, Anderson captured essential pieces of countless Galician families’ histories. As someone with very little documentation of my own family’s story, I find images like this one especially moving.

I was also thrilled to find Anderson’s photo of our street in Betanzos. The medieval stone archway hasn’t changed much over the past 100 years, except that little boys no longer carry loaves of bread on their heads (see the child standing in profile on the bottom left part of the picture). And that’s something magical about Anderson’s portrait of Galicia: so much has changed, but so much has also remained the same.

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I’ve joined the weekly drawing sessions since the beginning of this year, and was immediately struck by the poignant humanity of the event. Briggs always poses first, then others take turns in three to five minute intervals. With every new pose we’re dropped into someone’s kitchen, studio, bedroom, or office, and the time we spend observing and trying to capture their face through drawing feels intensely intimate. Afterwards, Briggs shares participants’ sketches on her Instagram stories, and it’s fascinating to see the infinite ways that people see each other.

Briggs kindly joined me for a conversation via video call last week. She’s a compelling artist in her own right, and we spoke about her background and art practice as well as the ways that Drawing is Free has evolved over the years.

Lauren Moya Ford: What’s your earliest memory of art? Do you come from a creative family?

Chloe Briggs: The house I grew up in was full of books and pictures. My dad studied as an architect and became a teacher, and my mum was a teacher and is an artist. I think like anyone, I remember drawing when I was small and the pleasure of it. I was lucky it was encouraged, there were art materials around, and I was told I was good at it.

I have early memories of my mum making alongside me and my sister as we played, which is something that I understand as love: people being together but deeply absorbed in their own creative work. Something like that happens in Drawing is Free, I think: we’re together, but we are all in our own thoughts and on our own journeys.

LMF: In 2008, you moved from London to Paris to work at a private art school. But you felt very strongly that you also wanted to find a way to share your teaching more widely. Where did that impulse to expand your reach as an educator come from?

CB: Well, you just asked me about upbringing and there are values that you grow up with. I don’t come from a privileged background in terms of money, but I come from a very privileged background in terms of love and support. As I said before, both my parents were teachers in public schools, I understood helping others as important and worthwhile. It was uncomfortable for me to take a job where I’d be teaching to only a select few who could afford it.

I actually had a very straightforward conversation with my dad when I got the job. I’d been teaching for some time already by then, and he encouraged me to ‘take the life in Paris.’ Which seemed obvious, I mean, it was an amazing opportunity. But I was very much caught up with this thought of how I could use the resources and the privilege that I had to give back or share with others.

I’ve said this in different ways at different times, but I believe education should be free, just like healthcare and other things that keep human beings well and happy. And so I wanted to reach as many people as possible.

I had some wonderful conversations with the writer Kyo Maclear about Drawing is Free. She said, ‘It’s not about you, Chloe Briggs. It’s something that runs through you.’ I think my desire to share comes from that energy of wanting to be connected with people in expansive and open ways.

LMF: Your first distance drawing classes were done by mail, with you sending creative prompts to students in different places. How did that idea occur to you, and do you see that moment as a kind of predecessor to what you’re doing now with Drawing Is Free?

CB: It was definitely the beginning. That project happened when I moved to Paris, and it was my first solution for sharing ideas and teaching beyond the walls of the institution and for free. I read an eloquent letter from an artist called Maurice Carlin about how he and a group of other students had just finished a foundation course in Manchester and were very disillusioned with higher education. They decided to set up their own art school, Islington Mill Art Academy — which still exists today — and I thought maybe they’d be interested in having some drawing classes. I wanted to support the initiative, and we spoke. Maurice said there were other groups who were doing similar things in Glasgow, Marseille, and Berlin.

So over the course of six weeks I sent instructions for a drawing class via the mail. I hadn’t met anyone who took part in the classes. The experience was purely activated by the receipt of something in the post, which is always precious, isn’t it? So it was like the arrival of the teacher came in an envelope.

The interesting part of the story is that one week when the post was late, the group in Manchester were waiting for my instructions and they hadn’t come, so they decided just to ask somebody else in the building to give them a drawing class. But it wasn’t the same. Somehow I had a presence. That was interesting to me: through writing, I could share ideas and somehow teach. Now it’s evolved into my Patreon and the booklets I write about drawing, but that was the beginning of finding other ways to connect.

LMF: Initially Drawing is Free was an in-person event in Paris. During the pandemic, it moved online. How did that new format and audience impact the project?

CB: Three weeks into the pandemic I thought, would this work online? So I made a very tentative post on Instagram saying, let’s just try it. There were probably about 20 people, and I remember we were all like blinking creatures coming out from hibernation or something. I was moved because a lot of them were my students at the time and people I worked with. And we drew.

What I didn’t predict was that it would be about portraiture, which seems silly now. I thought we would move our chairs back to see the whole figure or people would stand. But in fact, obviously with the screen we’re very close. We get this proximity, which in real life would feel uncomfortable. And that was kind of magic. The other thing that I didn’t predict was how visually beautiful the pixelated screen, slight delay, and varying kinds of quality are. It’s like a watercolor sometimes, or an analog media in a way, which is strange.

Then there’s the momentum around sharing the images, which I think has become very key to people taking part. I re-share drawings by participants from the session on my Instagram stories, so people can see the work of others. We’re excited by what each other does, and we try to emulate things that we admire. That’s where the learning comes from.

Through the desire to share, the audience has grown, and people have continued with Drawing is Free for almost six years. Now I’m drawing some of the same faces who were there right at the beginning, which is amazing. Some I’ve never met in person, but some I have, and some people have become great friends.

Going online really changed the project. I’m committed to access and non-hierarchical structures and, whether one likes these platforms or not, social media does democratize. It does terrible things too, but we’ve seen positive effects it has for sharing good things.

LMF: You’ve been so experimental and exploratory in your own career, from making wall sized drawings when you were a new mom to delicate drawings on the insides of cardboard food cartons during the pandemic. You also draw along with everyone in each Drawing is Free session. How do you decide on your approach to drawing — your method, materials, etc — in each class, and in your art practice at large?

CB: I just draw with what I feel like drawing with! It’s like the weather; it’s my mood. Sometimes I want to feel in control because emotionally, I feel out of control. So I might use a pencil or want to hold on to the line in a very particular way. And sometimes I can unleash all that is unconscious and go into the wet color with a dissolving image. It really depends on how I’m feeling, but I don’t question it.

I always tell people not to worry about having a consistent or recognizable way of working. I’m really not interested in that. I’m interested in making a drawing more than more than the outcome. I’m also motivated by excitement and about a question I have, like figuring out what a material can do. I like trying new things, and I get very bored staying with the same. Well, if I just stayed with one thing, I would probably get very good at it. But I think it’s like being a one-woman band: I’ve got to learn all my instruments.

LMF: Speaking of a one-woman band, music is what structures the sessions: each participant-model holds a pose for the duration of one song on your playlist. How do you select the music for Drawing is Free?

Chloe Briggs: Again, it’s mood, but it’s also a love of music. I grew up with it — my dad loves music — so I have very strong memories of the way the vinyl albums were displayed at home. I loved the scale of them, the graphic covers, the colors, the faces of the musicians, and how those album covers were almost like a changing exhibition all the time. I have a strong interest in graphic design, and I loved all the Blue Note covers, those kinds of things.

My dad had such a wide interest as well. So maybe the music is also part of the diversity of it all, or the openness of the sessions. There’s no judgment of the style of music, what generation it’s from, or what it’s about. Sometimes a track of music might seem unlikely with the sitter if you were stereotyping people, and then you quickly realize that actually that stereotype doesn’t work at all. It’s a very special thing about the concentrated period of time looking at somebody’s face to draw them: you learn something about them in that moment, and in order to make a good drawing, it has to be without judgment.

Music also lightens things up, and keeps me from taking the drawing too seriously or thinking I have to be some great master at this before I can even dare to express myself. Actually, you could draw with your left hand and dance to something and just be in the moment and make an extraordinary drawing. That’s part of the ‘Free’ part of the title of the project: hopefully you feel free to draw.

So as we see with people’s work, there’s such joy, daring, and personality. We see people when we draw them, but we also see them when we see their drawings. By sharing their work, people are being vulnerable. It’s usually just three to five minutes to make a drawing during the sessions, so you’re not going to be making anything perfect, whatever that means. It’s all very alive, open, and raw.

LMF: That vulnerability works both ways, because posing for so many people can also take courage.

CB: There’s a beautiful interview with Rachna Garodia who speaks about how posing brought a big breakthrough in her own drawing. Initially when she began posing she wanted to get the hell out of there and was thinking, How long is this song going to last? But then she relaxed into it and was quite moved about being seen. And it made her see others differently. So I think posing is very much part of it.

LMF: How many people attend Drawing is Free nowadays? Do you have a sense of their backgrounds? Do you interact much with folks outside of the sessions?

CB: On Monday evenings there are now over 600 people. It’s a very intimate project and we’ve just spoken about vulnerability, but I am boundaried in my way of organizing it. There’s no chat. There’s a beginning and an end. I can’t be friends with 600 people, or respond to everyone’s drawing, as much as I would love to. And I find how it’s grown hard, actually, because I can’t resist when people write such wonderful, sensitive, and kind things about my drawings. I want to, but I can’t; I don’t want Instagram to consume me. So on that score, it’s a kind of mystery where most of the people are from.

But as I said, this project runs through me, and lots of friendships and relationships have grown because of this community. People have contacted each other on their own and gone on to meet up, become friends, and encourage each other. So I’m very glad for that.

LMF: When you spend time looking at someone’s face in this deeper way of drawing them, you inevitably become so curious about who they are.

CB: Yeah, and then they’re gone. It’s like suddenly seeing a butterfly, and when it’s gone, you think, That was beautiful, and now it’s over. It’s moving. And maybe there’s something of that in the project overall: I don’t want to pin it down, I don’t want to fix it. There’s something about that in drawing for me: you’re intensely in the moment, and it’s fleeting. It’s going to change. It’s about recognizing that and not trying to hold it or crush it and say, that is mine.

LMF: Something that I noticed from the first session is that almost every model has a little bit of a smile at the corners of their mouth, like there’s this joy that they’re holding inside them for the entirety of the pose.

CB: I think one feels the respectful gaze on you. It’s a very nice feeling that holds you; you feel held. Sometimes if I’m going through something, I think, Wow, will I be able to sit for four minutes and not feel too emotional? But actually, I feel strengthened by it. It’s not something that undoes me. It’s kind of the opposite.

LMF: What is your hope for participants during the sessions, and how do you see the event evolving in the future?

Chloe Briggs: My hope is that they establish or re-establish a love of drawing. That’s it. That’s that’s that’s the whole mission of this, is that people draw for pleasure.

In terms of the future, I’m not too good with predictions. As I said before, and this is linked to how I draw and how I make things: I’m very much in the moment, and I think that’s been key to the project as well. I’m committed to it, I love it, and I don’t see a time when it’s going to stop being fascinating, different, and engaging. Because every time we do it we learn, and learning is just exciting and endless.

It’s hard to draw. It’s a challenge each time. And then there’s that incredible joy when you’ve actually made a drawing where you feel like, Wow, I did that. That’s such a great feeling, and it’s good for all of us, isn’t it? It’s also about being with others, and about caring for other human beings. Drawing is Free is about empathy and celebrating this human being that’s different to me and who I don’t know anything about.

The project is about so many things, but I always say that you just have to do it. People might read this, but they won’t really know what it’s like until they’ve done it themselves, right? So I’m hoping that people will be tempted to try because it’s a great joy.

Drawing is Free happens most Mondays from 9 am - 10 am and 6 pm - 7 pm Central European Time. Learn more here.

Fast forward to 1949, when the young Galician artist Isaac Díaz Pardo returned to his homeland from Madrid to escape a commission from dictator Francisco Franco’s fascist government. (I wrote about this in a previous post). He founded Cerámicas do Castro in the former stables of a house owned by his wife’s family in Castro de Samoedo, a village named after a nearby Celtic castro ruin. Díaz Pardo’s goal was to investigate new aesthetic forms, to reclaim historical Galician visuals, and to develop a unique product informed by the region’s local culture and identity. His project used kaolin from Sargadelos’s original location in Cervo, and the factory gained popularity. Some years later, and with the help of Galician artist exiles like Luis Seoane, it joined with the original factory to create a new wave of artistic and cultural projects that reached far beyond Galicia.

Today, the factory is open to the public on Monday through Friday mornings. Visitors can observe employees working on Sargadelos products up close, and through every step of the process. Sargadelos is special for many reasons, including its colorful history, small-scale production model, longtime connection to rural communities, and its attention to every aesthetic aspect of its activities, including the facilities’ singular architecture and furniture. I stopped by on a rainy morning this week. Here’s what I saw.

You can find more of my photos of the factory here.

On June 25, 1951, Henri Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire finally opened after years of work. The renowned artist had designed the small sanctuary in Vence, France from the ground up, meticulously laboring over its architecture, stained-glass windows, ceramic murals, doors, holy water fonts, and of course, the chasubles that its resident priests would wear during mass.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Matisse’s chasubles are delightfully and exuberantly atypical. Stars, leaves, flowers, and flames flash across these spectacular garments’ surfaces, which are sewn with dazzling pink, red, purple, green, and black silks that stand out against the cool white interior of the chapel. Each chasuble truly is a wearable, brilliant piece of art.

As with so much of his late work, Matisse’s vestments were created using the artist’s pioneering collaged paper cut-out technique. He mastered the method despite a debilitating abdominal cancer that often left him confined to a wheelchair or bedridden. But the cut-outs opened a new channel for creative inspiration in Matisse’s practice, and “the chasubles were made one after the other within a short time frame, in an atmosphere of great joy,” the artist’s studio assistant Paule Caen-Martin later explained.

That joyful feeling is clearly transmitted in the garments themselves. With their bright colors and floating forms, the chasubles appear almost weightless, recalling both their paper origins and the vesting prayer traditionally recited when priests put their chasuble on: “O Lord, Who said: My yoke is sweet and My burden light.” Indeed, Alfred H. Barr, the former Director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, likened the chasubles to “gigantic butterflies” when he visited the artist’s studio in Nice in 1952, proclaiming them “among the purest and most radiant of all Matisse’s work.”

Most people would assume that an artist who overcame the challenges of serious illness at the end of his life in order to create a Catholic church was probably a card-carrying believer, but that wasn’t the case. Matisse was baptized a Catholic when he was born in 1869, but as an adult he was often characterized as an avid atheist. When asked if he believed in God, the artist famously retorted, “Yes, when I am working.” Matisse’s unlikely path from avant-garde art rebel to dedicated chapel architect came from his friendship with a 21 year-old woman that he met in 1942.

Monique Bourgeois helped Matisse — then in his 70s — to recover from cancer surgery and served as the artist’s model before entering the Dominican convent of Vence, where she became Sister Jacques-Marie in 1946. Her order needed a new chapel, and Matisse’s involvement began when Sister Jacques-Marie shared her ideas for stained-glass windows with him. Matisse advised the young nun, but “became so interested in the new color problems presented by fenestration that he designed dozens of hypothetical windows of his own,” Janet Flanner writes in her lively 1951 New Yorker piece on the artist. Soon, he was ready to dedicate the next four years of his life to the project. According to Flanner, “Matisse offered to work on the chapel on one condition — he would design all or nothing.” And that’s what happened.

Actually, this wasn’t the first time that Matisse moved from canvas to clothing. He created sets and costumes for the Ballet Russes’s productions of The Song of the Nightingale (1919) and Rouge et Noir (1938). The latter ballet even featured an early version of Matisse’s cut-out technique on the dancers’ form-fitting costumes. As the artist told Dominican Brother Louis-Bertrand Rayssiguier, “I am not doing that [the chapel] to make a church, I am doing it as I would a theatrical set.” Fittingly, his splendid chasubles and their accompanying stoles, burses, maniples, and chalice palls “would play an essential role in the staging of the highly codified dramas that are religious ceremonies,” curator Dominique Szymusiak notes.

Still, the garments and chapel transcend a feeling of aesthetic pleasure alone. The airy but intimate sanctuary — which I was fortunate to visit on a sunny afternoon in late December — is suffused with an ethereal sense of lightness that invites us to let go and loosen in the safe, luminous space that Matisse has provided. In an interview I conducted in 2019 with Naoko Matsubara, the artist conveyed the unique feeling of the chapel perfectly: “Matisse’s religion was to make color into spirituality,” she told me. “He did everything the simplest way possible, but I could see his very refined spirituality there.”

The chasubles were a place for Matisse to express and explore the energy of life, but they also allowed him to embrace mystery. This is especially true in the black chasuble, which is worn only for funeral services and on Good Friday. In Matisse’s version, the garment is emblazoned with the Provençal phrase Esper lucat, which means “open your eyes,” or “let hope shine.” Dominican Father Alain-Marie Couturier, who worked closely with the artist as he developed the chapel project, said, “I told him that it is not a sad chasuble, but a chasuble of resurrection. He answered, ‘Death is not the end of everything; it’s a door that opens,’ and immediately the artist’s eyes were filled with tears.”

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In reality, Baya didn’t just disappear. After her exhibition in Paris she returned to Algeria, married, had children, and eventually returned to art making well before her death in 1998. She has remained an important cultural figure in her homeland, and over the past few years there’s been a resurgence of interest in her remarkable life and work elsewhere, too. Baya retrospectives were staged in Paris and Marseille in 2022 and 2023, and the prestigious Paris gallery Mennour announced their representation of Baya this past fall. They will host an exhibition of her work in 2026.

I first discovered Baya’s work through Alice Kaplan’s fascinating 2024 biography of the artist, which I reviewed for Glasstire last year. When my review of Seeing Baya was published I reached out to the author, who told me that a handful of the artist’s works are currently on view in an exhibition about Matisse in Madrid. I haven’t had the chance to see that show yet, but I did get to see a small but beautiful display of Baya’s work on a recent road trip to southern France.

Baya: Oeuvres de 1947 at the Fondation Maeght features a selection of paintings from the artist’s fateful Paris debut. The setting is an important part of the show: the Fondation’s creator Aimé Maeght was Baya’s dealer, and the works on display here come from his family’s collection. It’s worth mentioning too that the Fondation Maeght was France’s first private art institution when it opened in 1964, and its stunning sculpture gardens and buildings designed by the Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert (who also created Joan Miró’s Mallorca studio and the Fundació Miró in Barcelona) are very worth visiting.

Though things seem to be changing now, Baya’s artworks are still relatively hard to come by in books, exhibitions, or museum collections, so it was a treat to see so many of her pieces gathered together in one place. Baya painted with gouache on cardboard, humble materials that nonetheless sing in the artist’s bold strokes and jubilant colors. Her works show a singular world of female care and pleasure, where women in joyfully-patterned dresses commune with nature, set tables, hold babies, and rest.

Baya made these paintings while working as a domestic servant for Marguerite Caminat, a French artist and archivist. Caminat left Europe for Algeria to escape World War II and later hired young Baya to work as her cook and maid while encouraging the girl’s prodigious artistic talent. Baya and Caminat’s complex relationship is explored in Kaplan’s book, which also highlights the growing tensions between colonial Algeria and French rule.

I was happy to find a small catalog dedicated to Baya’s paintings from 1947 at the Fondation’s gift shop. The slim book features texts about the artist and her work by André Breton, Frank Maubert, and Jean Peyrissac, European men who each view the artist with an admiring but at times exoticizing and even patronizing lens. “How does one become an artist? Baya never asked herself this question. Baya was born an artist, without formal training, without formal education,” Maubert proclaims. The writing is an important testament to Baya’s influence, but when the authors emphasize the artist’s supposed simplicity and innocence, they risk depicting her as primitive and lacking self awareness, too.

As a young Muslim Kabyle-Arab orphan girl, Baya didn’t fit neatly into the expected profile of an artist genius at the time. This discrepancy made her the subject of much speculation and even mythmaking around her life story, as Kaplan explains in her book. Something similar happened to Frida Kahlo at her 1939 Paris debut, and to Janet Sobel, the New York City immigrant, homemaker, and grandmother whose innovative drip paintings predate Jackson Pollock’s more famous ones. Though undeniably powerful, these women’s work was seen as somehow separate from mainstream male art currents; critics and audiences could accept their creations if they were labeled as somehow elemental or primitive, stripping a sense of the creators’ agency and talent.

For me, Baya is the most exciting artist I’ve seen in a very long time. I’d be happy if I could achieve a small portion of her excellent color sense and visual confidence in my own pieces. I look at her work and feel inspired to paint, to try, and of course, to keep seeking out her work wherever I can.

Yoko Kataoka - Maià de Montcal, Catalonia

Yoko Kataoka was born in Tokyo and studied the Bingata textile dying technique in Okinawa, where the method originated in the 14th century. After living in London, Kataoka moved to Catalonia, Spain in 2005. This summer I attended one of her wonderful Bingata workshops, where the artist shared the fascinating dyeing process along with her research on natural materials and her own stunning artworks.

Javier Arce - Valles Pasiegos, Cantabria

After living and working in Madrid, London, and New York, Javier Arce moved to a small shepherd’s cabin in the Valles Pasiegos of Cantabria some 20 years ago. This lush natural environment has inspired a shift in the artist’s work towards observation, painting, and making connections between land, garden, canvas, and studio. I wrote about Arce’s jewel-like paintings in 2024, and this summer I was fortunate to visit him and see the natural inspiration behind his beautiful work in person.

Vicente Blanco & Salvador Cidrás - Lugo, Galicia

Vicente Blanco and Salvador Cidrás are Galician artists and collaborators who live in Coeses, a village near Lugo, Galicia. In addition to their own individual art careers, Blanco and Cidrás have developed an extensive and exciting practice as educators. They work as professors in the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela’s Facultad de Formación del Profesorado, where I visited their experimental teaching space, the Laboratorio de Formas, early in the year. Blanco and Cidrás won the Premio Marta Mata de Pedagogía in 2020 for their innovative project Escola Imaxinada and have published the books Dibujar el Mundo: Jugar, crear, compartir (2022) and Educar a través del arte: Hacia una escuela imaginada (2023).

Bonus - The Printmaking Studio at the University of Houston

As many of you already know, I’m also a practicing artist. Last year the University of Houston’s art department invited me to create a new lithograph edition with the help of the exceptional master printer Patrick Masterson assisted by the artist and graduate student Jai España. I made the drawing on the lithographic stone last year and this spring and summer I returned to UH’s printmaking studio to check on this beautiful, very labor intensive process. I’m so pleased with how the piece turned out! I signed the print edition in the summer and hope to make them available in 2026.

Since this is the last post of 2025 I want to express how very grateful I am to you all for reading. I really appreciate everyone who has subscribed, and a special thanks to those who have chosen to support this project financially, which makes a huge difference. Sometimes writing can seem like a very solitary endeavor, but sharing my more personal encounters with art on this blog has helped me feel connected to a wider world. I wish everyone the best in the new year!

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This year I’ve been fortunate to visit a number of studios around Spain, and I’m sharing them with you. Here’s the first chapter:

Tamara Valdez - Capellades, Catalonia

Tamara Valdez is an artist and researcher based in Germany. Originally from Corpus Christi, Texas, she is currently working on a Fulbright project in Capellades, a small town about an hour northwest of Barcelona. Her current work centers on the Museu Molí Paperer, an 18th century paper mill that I will write about in a future post. Learn more about Valdez here.

Tomás Gracia - Madrid

Tomás Gracia is a Chilean artist who has been living in Spain since 2011. I visited his Carabanchel studio in late November, when he was hosting a group show with other Madrid-based artists. Gracia’s unique wood constructions resemble games or puzzle pieces, and many have moveable and interchangeable parts that invite us to touch and engage with them. These fascinating works inhabit an interesting space between painting and sculpture.

Anne Heyvaert - Oleiros, Galicia

Anne Heyvaert was born in the United States, grew up and studied in Belgium and France, and moved to Spain in 1980. After living in Luxembourg for a time, she settled in Oleiros, Galicia in 1994. I visited her attic studio this fall, where Heyvaert works primarily between drawing and printmaking. For several years her practice focused on maps, but her latest prints take light as their central theme. These contain a remarkable sense of luminosity, as if they themselves radiate light.

Luis Vassallo - Madrid

Luis Vassallo was born in Madrid, where he also lives and works. I first met the artist a decade ago, when I visited his studio shortly after moving to Spain. Vassallo is a painter, sculptor, and graphic designer, which I suspect accounts for his impeccable, almost rhythmic sense of composition and color in his bright, compelling artworks. He is also a diligent student of art history, and during our visit this September the artist shared with me a neatly organized notebook of artistic inspirations ranging from Atsuko Tanaka to Thomas Nozkowski, along with a joyful, handmade artist book.

Part II coming soon…

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