Drawing is the verb of painting. It is the beginning of artistic creation, the basis on which to develop an idea, a fabric, a painting. Even if it is to transform the original concept. He already said Picasso that nothing is better than the first sketch. But he also added that there is nothing more difficult than a line. She knew what she was talking about. His traces carried the ancient history that began in the caves of Altamira to project them into the future. Maybe Miquel Barcelo be today the penultimate exponent.
This long journey is what is used Artur Ramon Navarro (Barcelona 1967) to illustrate us through ‘I still learn. Fifteen episodes about drawing’ (Editorial Elba). An arduous work of synthesis of a art historian, antiquarian and gallery ownerwho lives his vocation with passion and disseminates his ability with enthusiasm.
It was the classics who bequeathed us the firm will of the Permanent learning. Over the centuries, Michelangelo and Goya made it explicit at the end of their long lives – at 89 and 82 years, respectively – adding the historic “ancora imparo”; (I’m still learning) between the strokes of her final works, although to detect the sentence you have to look closely. That means looking, observing and not just seeing.. Something less and less frequent, according to Artur, because they teach us to read but not to look. Of course, disguising while distorting the basic concepts in our crazy evolution. A time of transformation foreign to culture understood as a secular element of progress.
Culture that, by the way, “is not a good that can be bought or transmitted like someone who collects information on a memory stick to pour it into another computer,” argues Ramon. That is, for him the culture It is not just another consumer product., despite the new museum trends designed to establish simple headlines in the general knowledge of the mass visitor. They are of little use if they do not invite us to deepen what we have seen later, outside the rooms. Nor will it be due to lack of access to the information we carry in our pockets. There where “it is dematerialized by storing it in a foreign world, the cloud, which is accessed through flat screens.”
And he adds: “Culture is an achievement. “It is the result of a long learning process through a triangle whose three vertices are curiosity, passion and rigor.” Redefinition that sounds like I regret what we are losing along the way.
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Artur Ramon’s book is a kind of redemption which must be welcomed, because it serves as a guide to learn many things, beyond the fifteen drawings that have become a great excuse. And so, intertwining personal anecdotes with pages of history, memory with a close academicism, professionalism with an always detailed description of the artistic motive that inspires him, he urges us not to give up in the noble desire to always want to learn and never give up. for satisfied.
It is that innate curiosity, coated with accumulated readings, that allows you to fantasize by taking us to Michelangelo’s workshop, for example, and tour it as if we saw it. Or add a fetishistic touch to the pleasure of contemplating the original drawings of the great masters. Some better known than others, but all of them magicians who reveal their intimacy to us through their obsessions.