The Santa Cruz Artist

By Roger Core

This is about a Santa Cruz artist who searches for an art thief in Gibraltar, the Canary Islands, and Marrakech.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524528546

Roger Core

About the Author Roger Core is a new author with two finished books: a novel, The Santa Cruz Artist, and a historical fiction, Pony Bay. He lives in a college town surrounded by horses and alfalfa. He attended the University of Virginia and graduated from the University of Michigan. He was raised on a farm near Salem, Oregon. His wife is a retired teacher, and he had an advertising agency in Connecticut. They have five children.

Book preview

ONE

1995

Cass McBride was a six-foot, twenty-five-year-old American artist living with his Spanish wife Brisa (meaning breeze, pronounced bresa), whose hair was black as coal and skin light tan, both gifts from her Mediterranean genes. They lived in Santa Cruz; an upscale borough of Seville—in a two-story home made of white stone and tile with an iron grill gate leading from the street to an archway where the path was bordered by palms, ferns, and potted geraniums. Among the foliage she hid her red Vespa called Lucy, and would pause at the blue-tiled fountain whispering water in the flower garden.

For seven hundred years, the mysterious, medieval, African Moors inhabited the south of Spain named Andalucia; their presence brought poetry, art, mathematics, architecture, and a strong influence on the Spanish language.

On a cool evening in Madrid, Cass and Brisa first met at the Tapas del Papa: a busy bar under a portico surrounding the hugely spacious Plaza Mayor. Constructed in 1617 to bring peace to the frantic neighborhood, attractions were brought in—both interesting and ridiculous—to entertain the public with bullfights, public executions, and political rallies; and on Sundays, tables were spread out for philatelists and coin collectors.

Please excuse me, may I stand on your sawdust? Cass asked, arriving with a frothy glass of San Miguel to be near a striking, beautiful woman dressed fashionably in a white blouse, blue skirt, and coal-black hair falling to her shoulders. She was sipping sparkling cava from a champagne flute while the girl next to her nibbled an anchovy tapa, and wore a rust-colored cardigan sweater, black slacks, patterned scarf, and, of course, black hair, though cut short.

Sure, you can stand here. It’s cheaper than sitting at the tables, Brisa spoke as both women smiled at the intruder.

Thanks. My name is Cass, from Ohio, he said with a getting-to-know-you strategy by applying the perfect Spanish he had learned in Seville as an exchange student, and whose family still visited.

"I’m Brisa, and this is my cousin, Isabel. We’ve lived in Madrid all our lives. But we know about Ohio and the Ohio River with Lewis and Clark, and the alfalfa brought to America by the conquistadores. The latter, by the way, is a history we’re not proud of."

My gracious! he replied, astonished. May I ask what you guys do?

What do you do? Brisa bounced back.

I’m an artist. A painter to be exact.

Do you make a living doing that?

Yes, ma’am. I have a studio-gallery in old town, only fifteen minutes from here. Things are going great, at least at the moment.

Brisa snipped, Do you mean at the moment with us, or the moment with your painting?

He peeked around Brisa’s back to appeal to Isabel. Am I safer with you?

Not necessarily. I am married and a teacher, and my husband is home tonight.

He let you out?

Not really. I let myself out.

He now regrouped. I fill my canvas with light from sun-soaked Valencia where the great Impressionist Joaquín Sorolla was born.

He now looked at Brisa. It’s your turn, if that’s OK? Or shall I guess what you do?

Guess! she answered.

Are you a flight attendant?

No. She then began shaking her head at each of his attempts.

"You’re an artist.

You’re a model.

An art agent.

An art teacher.

Oh boy, this is getting tough."

Isabel offered a hint. Your work is very familiar to hers.

I give up. We’ll be here until morning.

No, we won’t, Brisa responded. Isabel and I are working girls. As for my job, you probably won’t believe this, but I’m a curator at the Sorolla Museum. You should come by, Sorolla is a painter too. Her sarcasm continued, which he ignored.

In fact, I was there this afternoon, he replied, and the day before. I’m surprised I missed you. I was probably too absorbed. How about meeting tomorrow?

I have a half-hour break at one o’clock. We can chat in the museum’s garden.

That’s a date. I’ll walk you ladies to the metro.

SOROLLA MUSEUM

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida built his grand mansion in a suburb of Madrid. His architect was Enrique María de Repullés Vargas, whom Sorolla (pronounced soroya) mostly ignored. After his death, the family converted the home into a museum, guarded by a tall wall with a massive gate. Entering, you would admire the Andalucian garden, then proceed to a portico leading indoors to three connecting galleries exhibiting forty years of the artist’s work and revered collection of sculpture, ornaments, objects of precious stones, ceramics, textiles, and a table lamp created by his friend Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Sorolla had painted a full-figure portrait of the famous glass designer at his Long Island estate with him posing in a white suit and tie, and a small white dog standing alertly next to him. In the back was a garden of large yellow, purple, and white flowers. Being a painter as a hobby, he sat with an easel at his knee, and held a palette and brush.

One room exhibited two large painting: Boys on the Beach with three laughing children lying slanted and parallel, glistening wet on shallow water and brown sand, radiant from the intense light at Zarautz Beach in the northern Basque region. Remaining at the same beach, Sorolla painted another canvas titled Beneath the Canopy with three women dressed in white, standing under a wide parasol, one of the ladies looking through binoculars. This painting too was intense with the horizontal stripes of white umbrella, blue sky, and brown sand. An interesting display of character—like the boys grinning on the beach—was the women’s headwear. A straw bonnet on the woman, most forward, had a long transparent veil falling down her back, the second woman was smiling under a bonnet, flowered with roses, and the third lady had a black blowing veil engulfing her from the shoulders up.

A large upstairs room in his home was used as a studio for Sorolla to paint portraits of famous men, which he objected doing because of the absence of open air and seemed to affect his work and mind-set. But he did it for the stately income it incurred, though he did receive rebukes for not exploring his subjects deeper. The space was also used for preparing canvases and storing artwork, and was accessible to the ground level.

Painters were chemists, as were the old Masters Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Degas. Various methods were applied to obtain the desired effects of brightness, such as rabbit skin glue giving the canvas surface grip, and neutralizing the oil paint’s fatty acids for better longevity. Also, egg tempera or yellow ochre paint was utilized to brighten the image. The downside was that artists needed patience with each layer of glaze requiring at least one week to dry.

Sorolla’s fervor for Impressionism guided him to the outdoors, mostly at the beach that provided bright, colorful, sometimes huge canvases painted with long, spontaneous strokes of the brush, using active and social subjects, frozen in time, as in photography.

His parents were retailers, both of whom died prematurely, leaving him and his sister Concha with their uncle working at his locksmith shop. When Sorolla reached fourteen, he began night-drawing classes in his hometown of Valencia, where he was influenced by the master painters in the area with an opportunity to join the photographer Antonio Garcia Pérez as an illuminator to manipulate light for his mentor’s creative needs. Also, he found an opportunity to meet Pérez’ daughter Clotilde, his future wife.

It was early spring when Sorolla strolled into his garden carrying a tall blue vase to add to his still-life of morning roses. He was in his late fifties and felt fresh as he withdrew his painting tools to continue work. Instead, he collapsed into the flowers and hedge, and lay calling for his wife.

Leaving his left side paralyzed from the stroke, the family nursed him for three years, but with little progress. He would sometimes be carried to his upstairs studio in an attempt to paint with his right hand.

He died in 1923 at age sixty. Clotilde then directed the museum to be added, which would open nine years later.

TWO

ONE YEAR LATER

The light from their studio’s north window engulfed Brisa as she sat on the sofa wearing a long, white dress and a red zinnia in her hair. An easel and stretched canvas stood between them. Cass was in his traditional working attire of a long-sleeved shirt dappled with colors from his pallet. Fumes from the oil paint and turpentine filled the air that he called painter’s perfume.

"My love, you remind me of Sorolla’s wife on a bench in the garden with her daughters. Remember how it dominated the museum wall?

"It was wonderful with the light, like you are.

I think that painting was after Sorolla’s success at the New York Exhibition, when he painted the amazing portrait of President Taft at the White House. The painter and his family stayed for six days, all of them speaking Spanish. Isn’t that great? Taft was from Cincinnati, which you probably already know with your unequivocal knowledge of the State of Ohio.

Let’s go to Madrid, she said, out of the blue, and spend six days with Sorolla. We’ll speak Spanish too.

And take your folks out so I’ll get another episode of your dad’s cop stories.

"I think Mom would prefer to eat at home so he can barbecue his famous black rice paella with squid."

That’s Sorolla’s Catalan dish from Valencia, which makes me love it all the more, and it’ll be interesting laughing at your father’s stories with my mouth full of black teeth from the ink of the squid.

Brisa relaxed from her pose on the sofa.

How are you doing, sweetheart? he asked.

Pretty good. Let’s take a break, though. Then she added, "Let’s drive to Madrid instead of taking the AVE."

OK. No need to rush. But it’s entertaining to whisk through the golden plains quilted with olive trees. I should do a painting of that. How about you nude in front of an olive oil drum?

How about me clothed in front of an olive oil drum?

AVE

The high-speed train AVE (pronounced ah-bay) was an acronym from Alta Velocidad España that came charging through the countryside at three hundred miles per hour. AVE was also the Spanish word for bird, which was fitting.

The interior was ultramodern with polished aluminum lavatories, automatic doors, and adjustable seats with tables. The nose of the front car had the air-steam appearance of a serpent. First-class service included meals with appetizers and beverages. Also, there was the bar car. While boarding, uniformed stewardesses greeted travelers at the platform door, and directed them to their seats. Luggage space was at the beginning of the aisle in every car. Announcements, music, and movies were accessible on a large screen.

The express line between Seville and Madrid would take less than an hour.

THORN

They filled the red four-door Austin with artist materials and tools, and two leather-worn suitcases. The drive to Madrid would have been three hours, but it turned out to be five with a long stop in Toledo to stretch their legs on the twisting slopes of the city.

Ducking into a café for a bite and coffee, a dark, thin man watched from a corner table,