Today I saw Miro.  The Fundacio Joan Miro is a museum and art center built specifically to house the works of this prolific Catalan artist.  He lived from 1893 until1983.  One of the few pieces of art I had in my living space as an undergraduate was a framed Miro poster.  His art has resonated with me for a very long time.

in a video showing an aging Miro at work in his Mallorca studio, the artist talks about how the initial marks on his paper or canvas are unplanned, and that the painting then develops around this initial figure.  I was struck by the similarity to Japanese painting.  Zenga is “bold and immediate, and almost always created spontaneously, in a single breath.”  On the other hand, in nanga, each brushstroke suggests the next. “New visual tensions are created as the painting develops” (John Daido Loori, “The Zen of Creativity”).  Miro traveled to Japan and so this influence is not surprising – only delightful.

Like Picasso, Miro fearlessly experimented with many different artistic media and even spoke of his paintings as poems.  Maybe haiku…