Always Ready To Sketch: A Weekend Teaching In Barcelona

Thursday 13th March

Dublin Airport. So happy to be heading off to Barcelona for a weekend of sketching. Even happier to be spouse-free in Dublin Airport. My husband Marcel has a different style from me when it comes to air travel: I consider myself relaxed, he considers me reckless; I consider him overanxious and rude, he considers himself careful and alert. And, when the cat’s away, the mice will play. I enjoy myself thoroughly.

Here is a fun but badly-drawn graphic of my Dublin Airport experience.

Once we land in Barcelona, I am picked up by the extremely stellar and inimitable Eli, one of the main organisers of the weekend festival. We go out for dinner together in a nice place oppsite my hotel, decorated in a kind of 50s Spanish style, with fake but very arty shanks of jamón hanging on a white-tiled wall. We have all kinds of delicious Barcelona food. Patatas bravas, croquetas, roasted cauliflower, tortilla, a lovely smooth glass of red. She is terrific company and as first evenings go, this is a very nice one. I am here to take part as an instructor for BCN Sketch Fest 2025, one of six students from Barcelona, Paris, Toulouse – and Galway.

Friday 14th March

The next day I am free until 4.30pm, when the event kicks off. Free to wander this beautiful city. Only trouble is, it’s very cold, and it rains without cease from morning until evening. I buy a cool-looking umbrella with Frida Kahlo all over it that is pretty tacky when opened. My hotel is very close to the Sagrada Familia by Gaudí, and its towers and steeples with their improbable toppers are a wonderful sight against the gloomy sky. But I cannot lie to you. It’s miserable. The scene is dystopian. Security guards in high-viz jackets corral sodden tourists into lines. Umbrellas knock each other and some people are heedless of others’ eyes. The sandy ground of the square opposite the church is a swamp. Puddles wait at every pass to give you wet feet and ruin your day. I try to look up what tickets might be had but phone screens don’t work in rain. I finally learn that nothing has changed since the day before – no ticket availability. I consider my only remaining option: playing the Catholic card and going to Mass on Sunday. I have no qualms about this, as my selfish desire to see the interior does not allow my conscience to get involved.

I give up, and start my long day of walking the streets. It is very sad. I can’t find anywhere nice to eat. In the end I find a Chinese dumpling house that is most un-Spanish. I text Marcel to complain. And my mother, and my sister, and my brother, as I am never one to suffer stoically. I would say I am a stoicism-free zone. When my screen is dry enough to function, I google something like “things to do in Barcelona in the rain” and one of the suggestions is to visit Casa Batlló, a Gaudí-designed private home. Well! I can only say to you that all the queuing in the rain and poking other queuers’ eyes out with my tasteless umbrella is more than worth it. The house is an inspiration of human creativity and genius. I am blown away and can’t stop thinking about the mind behind this œuvre.

Afterwards, I walk through the puddles to the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo to make sure I know where to go, in a little while. My phone takes me to the place, a large plaza dotted with contemporary-looking buildings, but I think the phone must be wrong: there are dark, mournful figures of homeless immigrants milling about aimlessly under the eaves, trying to stay dry. A sickening miasma of weed smoke hangs in the air, always guaranteed to lower my mood, since the days when fool boyfriends of mine never stopped indulging and I couldn’t escape it, nor the boyfriends’ resulting boring, catatonic states. It’s forty years ago, but one’s olfactory memory, and the emotions it evokes, are powerful. One or two of the guys on the street are pacing: I know better than to walk into trouble, so I do an about turn and take the long way out of the plaza.

I wander back through the wet and grey back streets, looking for a coffee and a sketch. I can’t find an atmospheric café to sketch in. I have images of…I’m not sure. The perfect Barcelona café. I don’t find anything close. The rain is making everything wrong. I pass a Starbucks. I text the husband that there’s no WAY I am giving in and going to Starbucks in Barcelona. But there’s no aetheist in a foxhole and so Starbucks is where I end up going. Sketching comes to the rescue, though, and I am greatly cheered up by the time I have finished the sketch, despite the sub-par, disappointing cinnamon roll, the women beggars who come in rattling cups for change and the horrible transparent raincoats they’re wearing, offending my gaze.

Half past four can’t come quickly enough.

At the appointed hour I am outside the Centro de Arte Contemporánea. The unhoused dudes are still lying around under the eaves. I don’t know where to go. Soon, a woman arrives, clearly a fellow BCN Sketch Fest attendee, and she cheerily says we’ll look for for the entrance to the venue. She casually steps over the bodies lined up outside the gift shop – giving them a friendly greeting and a smile as she does so, SO Spanish – and we find ourselves at the mouth of a steps that descend to a basement, the Auditorio, where the inaugural meeting and the talks will take place. I am unwilling to allow the grumpy feeling to leave just yet though, as I am as contrary as I am unstoical.

At the foot of this odd winding stone staircase, we’re in a large darkened room with a stage at one end. And then the grumpy mood vanishes into thin air. Within ten seconds I have been greeted by the assistant who’s been appointed to help me on Saturday morning, then a man lopes out of the gloom towards me: he’s the partner of one of my colleagues and is one of the nicest guys I have ever met in my nearly six decades on this earth. He greets me with a warm hug and a smile. Then I meet another colleague, one whom I have only met once previously, and he turns out to be adorable. And then another, and another, and an atmosphere of fiesta rises in the air. Then the talks begin. I am second up after the guy with a talk about a local architect who celebrates his centenary this year, and who is kind of the mascot of the festival. This architect, who died in the last few years, was responsible for the grid layout of the city. Up to the podium I go, launching into my Sketchakucha, a six-minute talk that each of the teaching instructors has been asked to prepare.

Mine is titled “Always Ready” and it’s about how the fact that bringing my sketching kit everywhere I go means I capture all kinds of moments: good and bad, happy and sad, and above all I am never available to the demons that have decided they like the cut of my jib and hang out with me. Sorry, demons, but when I am sketching I am otherwise occupied and cannot engage… In the talk I refer to my elderly father’s declining health, and how sketching has helped me come to terms with it immeasurably. How sketching when he’s anxious or confused makes me a better, more patient daughter.

The Sketchakuchas are brilliant. There’s one about sketching statues in Benin. Another about sketching mountains in Argentina. One about sketching in gouache (that one sends my artistic neurons crazy and I resolve to learn formally from the artist in question). One talk is about the joys of always having a project on the go. I concur with that idea TOTALLY. Really, the demons just can’t get a nagging word in edgeways when you are working on a project. “When you have a project,” says the speaker, “you go to sleep thinking about it. You wake up thinking about it.” He shares some projects of his own. Another guy talks about his beautiful watercolours in the quiet mellifluent voice of a poet, and indeed his art, the flow of colour across the page, is poetry.

Afterwards we repair to a local bar for wine, beer and tapas, and I meet more lovely people. It’s a fine evening, the rain has stopped and the food is delicious. You know the way you’re at a talk and you see someone and think, they look interesting? And then you get to talk to them and they’re even more interesting than they looked, and really nice too? That is my evening. At 9.30pm – yes, you read that right – I share a taxi back to the hotel and am tucked up in bed by 10.00pm.

Saturday 15th March

It’s dry! Hallelujah! It’s very cold but it’s dry. My spot is a beautiful, quiet square not too far from my hotel. I am there by 9.00am for a 10.00am start. The theme of my workshop is learning to use values, and I will be teaching it through Spanish. To my delight, the level is very high. After my intro, one student participant pipes up. “In fact,” they say, “the understanding of values is fundamental.” There are nods of agreement and I realise I am preaching to the choir. What a relief – that’s half the job.

By chance, a few days earlier, a friend of mine had made a superb and succinct comment by way of summary when I explained the principles of values to her. I had said you can see different values by painting a little column of different intensities of a colour, from zero paint, through very dilute paint, to more concentrated paint and finally to black ink. “Am I right in thinking you’re saying that if you skip a box or two, you’ll get better values?” “Yes, exactly!” I had answered. I thought that was genius. So simple. I share this with the students today, numbering the boxes in a column and showing them how they relate to different light conditions. Towards the end I make quick sketches of the various sketchers sitting around to demonstrate the differences between sunlight and shade when it comes to intensities of colour, what to do at borders and how to leave areas unpainted. I tell them that there are two words for the day: CONTRAST and DRAMA. (When I see the students’ work on Instagram, I realise they have got the message loud and clear – I see light glowing from every sketch, one of the main results of knowing your values.)

After a long and leisurely lunch with my wonderful colleagues, I am back for the afternoon session. I have been assigned two wonderful assistants for the next three hours. One manages my time and stays by my side from start to finish. “You need to go and spend time with that person,” he will say, or “you need to get onto the next topic now” – what a legend. My very own logistics manager, as my friend says after I get home (the same clever one who summarised the skipping-box thing so eloquently). At the start of the session, I have just told everyone that since Spanish isn’t my first language, I might be rendered speechless by the end of the afternoon, through breakdown of brain function. Then my second assistant addresses the assembled group. “Róisín Curé is an exceptional teacher,” he says in a booming voice. “You are very lucky to have her, so make the most of her.” And with that, my brain function fails, and I am speechless before I have even started. (“Your very own marketing manager,” says my friend later.) With my recent course in Enniskerry having been postponed due to lack of sign-ups, it’s very nice to be fêted like this, but it reminds me of the truism that we would all do well to regard success and failure as the impostors they both are.

I know this, but I don’t always feel it.

Here are some values-heavy sketches from the day. The beautiful violet colour is called Shadow Violet and it’s by Roman Szmal Aquarius, my favourite watercolour manufacturer.

The evening comes around, as it always does, and the work is done for the day. There follows another wonderful meal in a nearby restaurant and freely-flowing wine and beer. The food is exceptionally delicious. I am sitting beside a fantastic person – one of my assistants of the afternoon session – and I spend the evening in a happy daze, joy in all my senses, from food, from wine, from conversation. Many of my fellow diners are drawing the scene, and while I know you have to be careful with that – it can jolt you into sobriety – I do likewise. Just a very quick sketch.

Afterwards someone suggests taking the party on somewhere to have more drinks, and even though on nights out I am usually the one trying to quietly go home to my bed, this isn’t one of those nights. I walk with my friends through the dark, buzzing (and still dry) streets. One tells me about her family’s ill treatment at the hands of the dictator – her aunt was murdered by his henchmen – and I am reminded that life is fragile…and then we are in a giant square surrounded by magnificent buildings, making our way into a nightclub, and there are seven-foot-tall drag queens like birds of paradise acting as – welcomers? Bouncers? – and even though I have thoughts about that scene I keep them to myself, and we are in a cool stone basement, and there’s great music: we dance, my lovely colleague and I – the men sit it out – and I admire all the beautiful young girls while still being so grateful I am on the other side of that precarious time when you don’t know if you’ll meet the right person to be a champion to you and a father to the children you hope some day to have…

One of our party goes home at 1.30am but myself and my two colleagues (and friends) are not done. They are both natives of Barcelona and as we leave the club one of them, who grew up in the old city, gives me a private tour of the heart of medieval Barcelona. I have had enough drink that nothing matters, but not so much that I am in any way messy, and it’s perfect. Drinking to improve your mood is a fine line, and I am on the right side of it.

My host is proud of the experience he is sharing. “Róisín doesn’t want the history tour!” says his beloved. “Yes she does,” he says. I do. The streets are pristine, immaculate, completely deserted. Not a soul other than we three. My two friends are pulling enormous suitcases, and the trundling of the wheels makes an almighty racket on the cobbled pavement, but it is my host’s barrio and he will wheel what he likes along these streets. Every time I turn my head to look at something that’s being pointed out, I gasp in awe. The sky is pitch black, the moon is full, the colour of the stone and the streets is honey and ochre. I am bathed in magic, in the company of these wonderful people.

Then the night is over as suddenly as it’s begun and I find myself in a taxi. I have no idea of the name of my hotel. The taxi driver says I am not to worry, that if we can’t find it I can sleep in the taxi. I figure it out. I am in bed by 3.00am, happy, happy.

Sunday 16th March

The next day it’s time for a Sketch Walk in Parc de la Creueta del Coll to the north of the city. I am not feeling the Mae West, as they say. My voice is hoarse and I am shaky, leaving it to the last minute before hauling myself out of bed. All thoughts of pretending to be a practising Catholic in order to visit the Sagrada Familia church disappear in a puff of the incense smoke that I would no doubt have smelled had I gone inside. Over a coffee in the hotel I gaze out at the sunshine, and I see a steady stream of runners filing past in day-glo and lycra. The stream doesn’t trickle away. Hundreds of runners become a thousand. I realise there must be a marathon on. I have never been in a city during a marathon and I now discover a terrible truth: you can’t get a taxi, or a bus, during a big city marathon. I am aghast to realise you can’t even cross the street. I stand at the crossing like an idiot, watching with shame as an elderly lady with walking sticks nips nimbly across the street, weaving in and out between the runners. I harbour dark thoughts about marathon runners. I manage to cross the street and ask a young uniformed cop what I am supposed to do to get to my destination. He is a very Barcelona cop, with a huge woolly auburn beard and twiddled-with hipster moustache, hippie bracelet, tattoos peeking out from under the cuff of his uniform and those plug earrings that leave a giant hole in your lobe, the type you wish you hadn’t seen. He’s very nice though, and directs me to the metro.

At Parc de la Creueta del Coll I find a perch high up on a wall overlooking the public swimming pool. My mood has plummeted once again – curse that last drink! – and my drawing is going spectacularly badly. I hate it. I am using new paper and it’s not working for me. It’s a deckle-edge Hahnemühle sketchbook that the lovely representative of Hahnemühle has given me, and I am not loving it one bit. She has assured me it’s a 250g weight, but even though the internet agrees – I check – I suspect it’s not. I just don’t like it. Maybe it’ll grow on me, but today none of my pens are cooperating and I am struggling to make the marks I want to. I am alone again, and I am low again. Sketching only works to raise your mood (for me, at any rate) when it goes well.

I wander down to try and find friends. I can’t find any. All I see are happy families having fun in and around the playground. A baby boy, semi-submerged in a sandpit, whacks his truck happily with the back of a spade. No one so much as glances in his direction for the time it takes me to draw him. Sprightly, elderly people play ping-pong with their grandchildren. A stocky, rough-looking young man in shiny tracky bottoms and long dreadlocks, his head shaved at the side, plays ping-pong too. I don’t like him because he’s having such a nice time. I see more people not to like. Then I dislike everyone having fun.

The clock strikes 1.00pm, and it all comes to an end. It’s time for the group photo.

Everyone lines up on the steps. I hear my name being called and I turn to see some of my smiling, lovely friends and colleagues once more. They have all appeared in the sun like visions. There must be 300 people on the steps, from front to back. I see a big guy in motorbike leathers walking around on his own, carrying a small sketchbook with a couple of drawings of people in it. There’s something about those drawings that attracts me. I find the courage to approach him and tell him I like his drawings. He tells me he loved my talk on Friday, and that he loves drawing people, and that he would like to draw his mother. Then he says his mother has Alzheimer’s, and that for that reason my talk particularly resonated with him. In fact, he says, he’s going to visit her now, after this event. He looks at me, his face reddens and his blue eyes fill with tears. We give each other a tight hug of mutual support and I think how I misjudged him based on the motorbike leathers.

We all sit down for lunch. Not for the first time, nor even the umpteenth, I am struck by how healthy Spanish society is. People behave politely, but are not reserved. They share everything they have, and are gracious when you do likewise. We sit along a long row of tables, including the biker. He says he needs to go as it’s going to rain and his wheels will slip on the wet roads. One of my colleagues draws me, and it is most unflattering. (At home the next day I tell my son Paddy I’m going to tell all sketching colleagues at events to stop making my nose so red in their sketches, and Paddy says well then, maybe I should just not have such a red nose.) The sky darkens, it gets very cold again, I bid adieu to my lovely friends and head away.

I have a few hours to kill before I must head to the airport, and it is indeed raining again. I visit another Gaudí masterpiece, Casa Milá, another private commission. It is as beautiful as Casa Batlló. You have never seen, and will never see, a ramp to an underground garage as beautiful as this one. I buy a biography of Gaudí in the gift shop, but after a page of it I realise there’s no point, because there’s not much to say about his personal life: however I needed a biography in order to learn that.

I am picked up by Marcel at 3.00am in Galway. Luckily I have trained for this. On the way home in the car, he asks me how everything was.

“Utterly fantastic and utterly terrible,” I say.

“Nonsense,” he says. “You didn’t lose your passport. You didn’t get food poisoning. You didn’t miss a flight. Not being able to find the perfect café to sketch in is not very serious.”

“It’s okay for you,” I say, “you don’t have demons.” He does not.

But those demons know when they’re defeated. Just make sure you’re always ready for combat.

Taller en Dublín

Si quieres visitar Dublín este agosto, y quieres hacer un taller de urban sketching conmigo, dame un mensaje por email a sketchwithroisin@gmail.com. Dos días de un fin de semana en el centro de la ciudad, en una fecha en agosto, antes del dIa 18 del mes, pero no todavía decidida, en lengua castellano.