The Costa Brava

Today's travels cross off two pilgrimage sites in one day, numbers 6 and 7 for those keeping track in the Ten Pilgrimage Sites Magical Cycling Tour(tm) . For those not keeping track, (what, you don't like my blog? Well fine, be that way ...) here is the list so far:

• 1).Tabernas, where the Spaghetti Westerns were born,
• 2).Seville, where Columbus is buried,
• 3).Seville, where Velasquez was born,
• 4).Trujillo, where Pizarro was born,
• 5). Santiago de Compostela, where The Big Lie was born.

Pilgrimage site number six is the home and studio of Salvador Dali, the greatest painter of the 20th century, and the leading Surrealist of his generation. I have come to Portllegat not so much in homage, as curiosity; not so much "why?" as "how?". Dali produced a prodigious quantity of work, and in the process made many hundreds of millions of dollars; the total will never really be known as he preferred to be paid in cash or solid gold. Whether his talent warranted such largess is another subject, and is in my experience invariably a bitter point of departure in discussions with other painters who see him as a third rate hack with serious psychological traumatic issues. Dali never denies any of this, and in his memoirs wrote: "I am a third rate painter, but of all third rate painters, Dali is the best, Dali is the greatest, as my name predicted, Salvador Dali is the savior of painting of the twentieth century." In this vein, the doors on the outside of the building are worth special mention. The fishing boats in the bay are made of wood, even now, and thus require annual painting. Dali encouraged the local fishermen to dry out their paint brushes after painting their boats on his doors, thus creating, he claimed, the greatest abstract painting in the world. Needless to say, Dali did not hold abstract painting in high regard, and that is perhaps being generous.

Dali's egocentrism is legendary, but not without some external re-enforcement, and it was all part of a carefully crafted persona: whenever he was in public, he was "on", playing the role of Salvador Dali, mad eccentric Catalan Surrealist. I walked from the near-by town of Cadaques to Portllegat and the first thing one notices upon cresting the hill into the bay is that Dali's house, surrounded on all sides by high walls, is essentially the whole town. It all started accidentally; he lived in the family's vacation home in Cadaques, and would walk over to Portllegat to paint. He talked some fisherman into allowing him to use one of the shacks they used to store nets to store his painting supplies, rather than have to bring everything back and forth everyday. Eventually he asked if they might like to sell him the small building. Dali's relationship with his father was not ideal as he did not see Salvador's talent and worried how he was going to support himself. After some argument to that effect, he decided to leave Cadaques and stay full time in the small fisherman's shack. In this little structure, he set up his studio, and slowly started buying adjacent structures as he gained stature and wealth, till he essentially owned a large chunk of the town, which consisted of just a few houses. Largely through his wife Gala's brilliant marketing and strict managing of his career, he became a larger than life legend. Basically he came up with the wackiness, and she took care of the business end of it. He was a major cultural icon and the carefully crafted celebrity image he created with his outrageous stunts are so legendary as to almost eclipse his art. Consequently he needed his private space to create, but the crowds who came to this previously remote bay would sit outside his window just to catch glimpses of the master. This fed the already outrageous ego of his persona, to the point where he would watch beatifically at the gathered crowds below fighting over olive pits he tossed at them while he had lunch.

The house is set up such that there is an entrance hall (with a stuffed polar bear) which leads upstairs to the studio. There is a small reception room to the left. After that, all of the rooms were strictly private, and no-one except Dali and Gala's most close friends or personal assistants ever entered. His rigorous work schedule, set by Gala, was intense. During the height of his career, she would not have the maid bring him his breakfast until he had made at least $250,000. Once out of bed he would work feverishly in his studio completing commissions and design contracts until noon. After this he would meet with guests and business appointments for a few hours, have lunch, and then work continuously until sunset. Occasionally he would take tours on his boat, parked in front, around Cap Creus, never actually steering. Though he owned several Cadillac's, Dali never learned to drive, and was always taken places by his chauffeur and faithful assistant. He actually invented a set of kaleidoscopic eye glasses to relieve the boredom of long car trips. Also of note is that there are no televisions anywhere in the house, Dali considered televisions as being the most insidious instruments of "cretanisation" ever invented.
What strikes me about the house is that despite his incredible wealth, the house, with it's many mad idiosyncrasies, is actually quite simple. More than anything else it was an appendage to his studio, which was set up to maximize his productivity in the most relaxed and comfortable setting possible. Dali always painted sitting down on comfortable sofas, and the studio includes an elaborate easel which he designed and had built which involves a massive steel frame that moves up and down through the floor. At the touch of a button the frame onto which the canvas was attached is electrically raised and lowered, so that even while working on enormous canvases, he could still retain his overall comfortable seating position. The windows are set up following Leonardo daVinci's treatise on painting, allowing the maximum amount of natural but indirect light to filter in.

As Dali had the resources and did not want to be bothered going out for supplies, he purchased all of his paints in bulk. Down a narrow staircase directly from his studio he had a small warehouse of supplies.

The brushes he used were Escoda brand, made in Barcelona, which from experience I know are very fine brushes indeed. The paints he used are made by a small Belgian firm called Blockx, who use only raw pigment and linseed or poppyseed oil, and are all ground by hand. Rather than a factory, Blockx paints are produced at a lovely chateau in the country side. As might be expected, the price for a single tube of paint is stratospheric, but then when the color is lapis lazuli, for instance, it really is this crushed semi precious stone without any fillers or additives whatsoever. Possibly most critical to Dali's unique ability of capturing the blue of the water, sky and light of the Costa Brava was his choice of medium. Blockx makes a liquid amber which contains, you guessed it, amber. According to Dali's book "50 Secrets of Magical Painting" Dali further modified this medium by submerging wasps into it, which he claimed greatly increased the particular qualities he found essential to make his colors flow and stand out. Whether any of this is important is questionable. Modern technology has produced some very fine colors and mediums, and the choice of amber has certainly had an effect on many of Dali's works; many canvas are already showing signs of cracking and crazing.
I have posted many more pictures of his studio/house here.




Just a few short kilometers away is pilgrimage site number 7. That so many amazing things have happened in such a small area speaks highly of the amazing light, landscape and beauty of this magical place, and to the industrious creative energy of the Catalan people in general. The Costa Brava has seen many of the world's rich and famous vacation here, but more importantly artists have come here to create. Truman Capote wrote his amazing masterpiece "In Cold Blood" during three long summers in Palamos. Other famous artists in residence have included Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Garcia Lorca, Luis Bunuel, Richard Hamilton, Dieter Roth, Orson Welles, John Cage, and many, many others. Since Ferran Adria arrived in Cala Montjui near Roses in 1982, the educated palates of half the world have come here in pilgrimage and learnt to relate to food using all five senses. The contemporary high cuisine of the area owes much to Ferran's wild experiments in molecular gastronomy. Though elBulli restaurant is now closed, reopening in 2014 as a creative center, the meals that were served here were legendary. An army of chefs, waiters, sommeliers, and assistants would serve up thirty-five course meals with the occasional amuse bouche, each course paired with a certain wine, and sometimes even with a special olfactory component. Waiters would hold distillates of various ingredients or spray essences of rare herbs from perfume bottle atomizers under the noses of patrons as they sampled various dishes. Diners often did not know whether to touch, simply observe, other times listen, smell, or finally taste what was before them. In an ironic Post Modernist twist, an interpreter or narrator was assigned to each table to describe each particular course, sometimes recite a poem or Haiku, but mostly advise, since diners would invariably not understand what it was they were eating or even looking at. A giant hollow sphere which is in reality an asparagus soup with various herbs from the area, or an egg omlette that appears to be some sort of foamy dessert served in a champagne glass, a series of hollow ice cubes with flakes of gold with some flourescent-green pearls in their centers. The restaurant was only open for 7 months of the year, but the 8000 available reservations for the 250 euro 35 course meals sold out within hours of becoming available, often getting in excess of two million requests. Despite being voted Best Restaurant on the planet for an unprecedented 5 years, and being always filled to capacity, the place lost vast sums of money due to the large staff, high overheads, small seating capacity, and the enormous cost of producing the highly individually crafted ingredients of each meal. Adrian made most of his money selling books, consulting and selling the results of his extensive research.

There are still restaurants in the area which continue with this same tradition, many of them run by or employing some of the army of chefs who worked at el Bulli. Fortunately, for people planning on staying longer, there are also regular restaurants which serve traditional Catalan food prepared in time honored fashion (i.e.: without the aid of liquid nitrogen, cryogenic emulsifiers, microwave flash dehydrators, liquid drop solidifiers, and many other high-tech gizmos and laboratory equipment Ferran is famous for using), so without going too far out on a limb, it is easy to eat well, exceedingly well if one wishes, in the nearby town of Roses or Cadaques.

El Bulli is situated in a fairly remote area, several winding kilometers out of town, and while the many hordes of the Super Rich no doubt arrived on the beach after being dropped off from their mega yachts, I wondered how many others would have had trouble finding the small coastal access road that leads to the restaurant and become hopelessly lost.
Not far from this former gastronomic Mecca are some interesting dolmens, dating back to around 4500 BC, proving that early Iberians also thought this place special in some way.

Up the road from the Dolmens is the Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodas, which has a stunning setting overlooking the sea, and also the Eastern most starting off point towards Santiago for those contemplating doing the grueling Camino Catalan.