JOAN MIRO: COMMENT AND INTERVIEW
strictly by rules of composition after the first shock of suggestion has
cooled.
"-Then after the heavy burlap series of 1939 I began a group of
gouaches which were shown here in New York at the Pierre Matisse
Gallery just after the war-an entirely new conception of things. I did
about five or six of them before I left Varengeville for Spain and Ma–
jorca at the fall of France. There were twenty-two in all in the series.
They were based on reflections in water. Not naturalistically-or objec–
tively-to be sure. But forms suggested by such reflections. In them my
main
aim
was to achieve a compositional balance. It was a very long
and extremely arduous work. I would set out with no preconceived idea.
A few forms suggested here would call for other forms elsewhere to
balance them. These
in
turn demanded others. It seemed interminable.
It took a month at least to produce each water color, as I would take it
up day after day to paint in other tiny spots, stars, washes, infinitesimal
dots
of
color in order finally to achieve a full and complex equilibrium.
"As I lived on the outskirts of Palma I used to spend hours looking
at the sea. Poetry and music both were now all-important to me in my
isolation. After lunch each day I would go to the cathedral to listen to
the organ rehearsal. I would sit there in that empty gothic interior
daydreaming, conjuring up forms. The light poured into the gloom
through the stained-glass windows
in
an orange flame. The cathedral
seemed always empty at those hours. The organ music and the light
filtering through the stained-glass windows to the interior gloom suggested
forms to me. I saw practically no one all those months. But I was
enormously enriched during this period of solitude. I read all the time:
St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa, and poetry-Mallarme, Rimbaud.
It
was an ascetic existence: only work.
"Mter having finished this series of paintings
in
Palma, I moved
to Barcelona. And as these Palma paintings had been so exacting both
technically and physically I now felt the need to work more freely, more
gaily-to 'proliferate.; '
"I produced a great deal at this time, working very quickly. And
just as I worked very
c~refully
in
the Palma series which had immediately
preceded these, 'controlling' everything, now I worked with the least
control possible-at any rate in the first phase, the drawing. Gouaches:
in pastel colors, with very violent contrasts. Even here, however, only the
broad outlines were unconsciously done. The rest was carefully cal–
culated. The broad initial drawing, generally in grease crayon, served
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