Wednesday in the park with Mustafa, Ali, Inez and a cast of thousands...

    One of the things I love about Reus is the number of parks and plazas dotted throughout the city. My favorite of them all, however, is Parc Sant Jordi, which comes complete with interesting artwork and people of all ages who are even more interesting.
    I discovered the park one afternoon not long after returning from New Zealand while I was looking for a gym to work out in three or four times a week. I didn't find the gym that day but I did find the park and fell in love with it immediately. It's a fairly long walk to the park from this apartment but that's all to the good since assorted doctors have told me that walking will slow down the deterioration of the nerves in my legs. Besides, I enjoy walking through the city so even if it wasn't good for me I'd still find a way to get out and prowl around Reus every day.
    The park - named after St. George, he of the epic battle with a dragon - has a lot of sculpture, a couple of playgrounds for kids and shady walkways running throughout it. It also has benches (you can choose a shady one or find one that's parked in one of the the sunnier parts of the park.) I always carry a book or two in my backpack so for the first few times I visited the park while I was running errands I'd take an hour - two if I didn't have a lot of places to go - and read. A couple of weeks after discovering the park I added a sketch pad and some colored pencils to my pack and began drawing as well as reading.
    That's when my visits started to get really interesting.
    To understand what I mean you have to know that Reus is famous for producing artists and architects including Maria Fortuny and Antonio Gaudi (who wasn't born here but whose small village is close enough that the city claims him as one of its own.) Because of that, people here tend to be very appreciative of art in its many forms and they are not shy when it comes to discussing art and artists.
    So it happened that while I was quietly sketching one afternoon a man walked over, sat down on the bench beside me and asked to see my sketchbook. I'm as vain as the next amateur artist so I gave it to him. He leafed through the pages and gave me a running critique of my work. He liked the realistic drawings I had done of birds and trees - he was less impressed with the trees than the birds - but he was most taken with the wildly colorful, more fantastic drawings I did of birds and people. (When I say "fantastic" I'm not praising my work, just noting that the drawings were more fantasy than reality. I'm vain but not that vain...)
    That led us into a discussion of whether I had been influenced by Gaudi's Modernist architecture, which is known for its fluid, fantastic shapes and colors. I said perhaps but noted that I have always let my imagination run wild when drawing and painting. It wasn't long into that part of the discussion when he saw a couple of friends and beckoned them over. They also leafed through my sketchbook and before I knew it I was in a full-on discussion of my work, art in general and the use of color - which these guys all felt was much more important than shape.
    In the end, one of them asked if he could buy one of my sketches, which I sold to him for 1 Euro (about $1.30.) He thought I should charge more but I told him I'd already been well paid by the pleasure of their company and couldn't, in good conscience, take any more than that.
    Since then, I've also started hauling watercolors, brushes and paper to the park and have attracted a wide variety of onlookers, including a lot of kids. Some of them want to draw as well so I now bring even more paper and pencils with me when I go so they can try their hand at being artists, if only for a little while.
    To my mind, there's not very many better ways to spend a couple of hours on a sunny afternoon.

The fountain at Parc Sant Jordi shows definite Gaudi influences...

... as does this resting place...

... and this one.

The park is a really beautiful place to spend a few hours.

Inez wanted to draw but some of the other kids asked her first to be a model for them... she put up with that for about five minutes before she took a seat and began drawing.

Mustafa and Ali have stopped by a couple of times to draw when they see me in the park.

One of the entrances to the park.

In addition to the fantastic shapes of the fountains and resting places, the park also has more realistic sculptures.

And just in case you didn't know what city the park is located in...