The Teacher Who Painted a Miró

One of our teachers sent this over at the end of the summer. No fanfare, just a photo and a message saying she’d finally finished it. She’d been painting on and off for weeks, mostly in the evenings after her last lesson, and she wanted to know what we thought.

What we thought was: that’s a Miró. Not a copy of one — she hasn’t painted anything that exists in a gallery — but it speaks the language. The flat, unapologetic blue. The sun in the corner with a black asterisk stamped through it. A red crescent moon that looks like it was cut out with scissors. And in the middle, a great pink oval bristling with lines, like a sea urchin that’s swallowed a firework.

A Catalan farm boy who went to Paris

Joan Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893, the son of a goldsmith and watchmaker. His father wanted him in an office. Miró lasted about two years as a clerk before having what was politely called a breakdown and being sent to recover at the family farm in Mont-roig del Camp, down the coast in Tarragona.

He never really left that farm, in the sense that mattered. He went to Paris in the 1920s, fell in with the Surrealists, spent decades in Palma de Mallorca — but the ploughed fields and animals and night skies of Mont-roig kept turning up in his work for the next sixty years, boiled down further and further until a whole landscape could fit into a line and three dots.

People often file him under “surrealist” and leave it there, which he’d have hated. He said he wanted to assassinate painting — to tear down the polite, respectable version of it and start again from something more like a child’s drawing, or a cave wall. He was also, quietly, a Catalan through and through, working through the Civil War and the Franco years with a stubbornness that looks a lot like patriotism if you know where to stand.

He built himself a vocabulary

Here’s the thing that makes Miró interesting to us, of all people.

He didn’t paint pictures so much as write them. Over the years he settled on a small set of signs and used them again and again — a star, a ladder, an eye, a bird, a woman, the moon — until each one carried a fixed meaning you could read across dozens of canvases. The ladder means escape. The bird means the same thing, from a different angle. Once you know twenty of his shapes, you can walk into a room of his work and follow it.

Which is more or less how a language works. Not an enormous cloud of words absorbed all at once, but a small set of pieces, used constantly, in different arrangements, until they stop being pieces and start being meaning.

Some of Miró’s words, in Spanish

If you want to look at his paintings and name what you’re seeing, here’s a starter set. These are the shapes that come up over and over.

• el sol — the sun
• la luna — the moon
• la estrella — the star
• el pájaro — the bird
• la escalera — the ladder (also the staircase)
• el ojo — the eye
• la mancha — the blot, the stain, the patch of colour
• la línea — the line
• el lienzo — the canvas
• el cielo estrellado — the starry sky, a phrase that turns up in a lot of his titles

A couple worth pausing on. Mancha is a lovely word because it isn’t flattering — it’s what you’d call a stain on a shirt — and Miró used exactly that kind of loose, spilled shape as a serious element of a painting. And escalera doing double duty for both ladder and staircase is the sort of thing that trips learners up in conversation and is much easier to remember once you’ve attached it to a picture.

Where to see the real thing

The Fundació Joan Miró sits up on Montjuïc in Barcelona, in a white building he helped plan himself, with light coming in from above the way he wanted it. It’s a steady uphill walk or a short funicular ride, and it’s worth going early. In Palma there’s the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, built around his actual studio — they’ve left it more or less as it was, brushes and tins and all, which is oddly moving.

And if you can’t get to either, there’s always a blue tin of acrylic and a free evening, which is what our teacher did.

She told us the sun took about four attempts. The first three were too neat.

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Our tutors are the sort of people who paint Mirós in their spare time and then want to tell you about them in Spanish. If you fancy a lesson with one of them, you can browse tutors on Parlazo and book a single lesson — no subscription, no commitment beyond the hour.