Guy Mavor

 Spanish A2, Pre U: Exploring artists' and writers' childhoods in A-level cultural topics

 

Aside from the work itself and its immediate context, referring back to the artist's (or poet's / writer's / cineast's etc) formative years is rewarded in the mark schemes for the A2 and Pre U cultural topics. And it's rewarding in itself (it's not all about the grades, you know) to discover the artist's deeper motivations, and trace a line back to these first stirrings of an artistic sensibility, or aesthetic, or style - to feel that you actually know the person you're writing about. Literally, where they are coming from.

 

Gabriel García Márquez even had this kind epiphany about himself. On the way out of Mexico City for a family holiday in Acapulco in 1965, he turned the car around and drove his unimpressed family home, shutting himself away to write his masterpiece, Cien Años de Soledad, over an 18-month period, in which his wife sold the car and the family survived on the goodwill of local grocers and their landlord, who took no payment for the last 9 months it took to write. The epiphany García Márquez had was a sudden, vivid memory of a childhood sat at his many aunts' feet, listening as they chatted to each other, telling fantastical stories of growing up in the then frontier town of Aracataca in the eastern Colombian lowlands. Already a writer of some experience and success, he had finally found his voice in this dream-like recollection of childhood, and the fictional town of Macondo, based on Aracataca, became the centre of his imaginarium. Though he was described as a Magical Realist by critics, he always insisted he made nothing up, that it all came from the stories he had heard.

 

Pablo Picasso's relationships with women, with authority, and even with Catholicism and the very Spanish symbol of the bull, can also be traced back to childhood, in his case in Málaga, in Andalucía. He was born there in 1881, and spent the first ten years of his life in a very small social circle and geographical triangle (look it up on Google Earth or Streetview - a great resource if you want to take a wander around - try doing the same for Aracataca too). This took in the family apartment where he spent time with his mother and sister and other female acquaintances, on a square in central Málaga, a city where the temperature often dictates that life be lived outside. Picasso enjoyed playing and drawing in the dust of the square outside his home, and spent remaining hours in the provincial art museum managed by his father, a talented but unimaginative draughtsman with whom he took demanding drawing lessons from an early age, and the bullring, near the cathedral, where he went on Saturdays and Sundays respectively. Having been uprooted from this predictable, safe existence and moved to cold, closed-off (it is harder to live life at street level when it is wet and windy!) La Coruña aged 10, Picasso was driven by conflicting desires all his life, certainly in his art - both to return to his childhood state and to escape the limitations of a particular 19th century Spanish, conservative artistic tradition, as imposed by his father.

 

Finally, Pedro Almodóvar's own escape from the strictures of Catholic, Francoist, conservative Spain, from the monochrome black garb of its many Civil War widows and the grey-brown of the Manchego landscape in which he grew up, continues to this day, on screen. His extravagant colour palette and championing and humanising of marginal characters can be seen as a reaction to their suppression under Franco, and the direction in which he channelled his desire to express himself artistically can also be explained by his oft-repeated comment that his entire education took place on one street. He lived on the same street as his catholic school, but also a cinema, where he frequently, obsessively, went to watch both Spanish and the international films which made it past the censor - see which ones you can spot in his work.

 

If you are not studying any of these artists, or are not even studying Spanish but another foreign language at A2 or Pre U, the same principles nevertheless apply: look back, dig deeper, make a connection between the work you are studying and the artist's earliest experiences. You will, I hope, find inspiration (and indeed, both motivation and some of the knowledge you need to succeed in the dreaded exam) in noting that your own hopes, doubts and difficulties may once have been shared by your subject. And don't just wait for the notes from your teacher, though these are useful too - go and find things out for yourself, and tell your teacher what you've discovered. They should be thrilled, and if they're not, it's their problem, and you still will be. This is your education, not theirs. Good luck!