Who knew that?

 Pascual Segura tells us lots of fascinating things about the history of Bigastro. 

In his latest post her tells us about the old houses in the town that had a loft with a small window for ventilation. Apparently that is where they raised silk worms fed with mulberry leaves grown on trees in the town.

In the eighteenth century they would produce up to 5,000 kilos of silk per year. 

It was silk from those worms that was used to produce the cloak that the statue of Mary wears. 

Now my wife was born in Macclesfield. They didn't cultivate silk worms there but they did weave silk from Italy into fine cloth which made the town famous. 

Silk was woven in Cheshire from the late 1600s. The handloom weavers worked in the attic workshops in their own homes. Macclesfield was famous for silk buttons manufacture. 

Just needs a coat of varnish

I should really have started my painting for this competition earlier to give it a chance to dry properly. 

The general advice is to leave oil paintings at least 6 months before applying varnish. That is because the oils in oil paint cure rather than dry. 

I only finished my painting last week and although I didn't use thick undiluted paint, it still won't be ready for normal varnish.  

The problem is that parts of my painting appear matte and the colours a little dull without a coat of varnish 

I need to have it ready to hand in next week so I will have to apply a couple of coats of spray retouching varnish and hope that does the trick.  

Wish me luck! Last year I got third prize for my painting, "The Procession",  Let's see what happens with "The Floral Offering" this year. 

Corpus

 

Our paintings

 For those of you unable to visit the exhibition of our paintings, I have made you an album which you can find in the sidebar. 

From an idea proposed by Evaristo and I many years ago, BigArte was formed last year with six artists attending the first meeting in Evaristo's office. 

Our first exhibition was last May. Then we had a homage to my work as a photographer. That exhibition was restaged in the town square and in the Auditorium. We then went on to produce paintings for Santa Cecilia with the theme of music. 

Our latest exhibition is called "Diologo con los Maestros", a little of the Prado Museum in Bigastro. We were to reinterpret the old masters. 

Artists chose to reinterpret the works of Dali, Magritte, Picasso, Durer and others. The Spanish artist, Joaquin Sorolla was popular. My contribution included works based on Constable. Turner and Rembrant. 

All the paintings are offered for sale. 

Coming up

 

Our latest exhibition

Inaugaration at 8:30pm

 

The start of fiesta season