I bought a little plastic pack of modelling clay at a shop down the street. A lot of stationers put a pack in their window beside oil paints and drawing blocks and other artists� materials. In school everyone drew�drawing was still considered part of the liberal education. And becoming an artist was the dream of many boys�it was one of the heroes you could be someday, like a bullfighter.
I had never modelled clay before�not real clay from the ground; only that oily plastilene we played with as kids, which was nice enough but it never stayed put, never kept its shape. One day I had the idea to try to make a little figure in real clay and have it fired. I was sure I could make something nice for my shelf, or nice for somebody else�s. It would be fun.
I worked in my elegant bedroom, which had been a parlor before, complete with marble fireplace, velvet drapes, and chandelier. I put a newspaper down on the wobbly coffee-table and started squeezing a big lump of clay into the shape of a bull. I started after lunch, skipping siesta because I was too excited to wait, and lost myself so completely that when I finally looked up from my clay to see the time, the daylight was gone from the windows�it was evening!
As soon as I began to squeeze, I realized that I didn�t know what a bull looked like, which was surprising to me, since I had seen so many in the bullring. A charging bull�a fierce, muscular, charging bull�was what took my breath away when I saw it coming out of the gate in the ring; and now I wanted to get into my little clay figure some of that awe and terror and admiration I felt. But�could it be?�I didn�t really know how to construct a bull, even generally. Unbelievably, I couldn�t stop my figure, which I held anxiously in one hand, since I couldn�t lay it down without it flattening�I couldn�t stop it from looking like a pig, no matter how sharp and long I made its horns. This was humbling. I considered myself a good observer and I knew very much for a non-Spanish aficionado about bulls and bull-farms. I was often one of the first in the crowd to see a defect in a bull when it came out into the ring. I had several times gone to observe the bulls up close in the corrals at Batan before the big San Isidro bullfights. I even knew many of the peculiarities of the bulls from each farm: these had a long neck, those had dangerous turned-up horns, and so on. So I had assumed I should be able to model a very good bull, based on all that knowledge. Fool.
So squeeze and re-squeeze; gouge and flatten and bend and twist�there was no way to make that lump of clay look like a bull. Though I could talk about the long neck of the Miuras, I didn�t know the real proportions of a neck; though I could identify right off a Pablo Romero for his wide horns, I didn�t know the true shape of a horn; I could spot a limp in a bull in the ring but I didn�t know how to make a leg or join it to the body. An irritated bull had a swollen tossing muscle, but what did that look like from the top and how did the neck and shoulders meet? No idea.
The Devil is always around and he gave me a pride-saving idea. What you want to make isn�t a bull, he whispered. Don�t lose sight of your goal. You are modelling not a bull but your idea of a bull. Art is expression. You don�t need to know more than what you feel�that�s after all why you are modelling. Exaggeration is part of expression. Who was it said that no great work obeys the traditional canons. If Michelangelo�s Giants would escape from all that rock around them and walk off, you would see monsters of disproportion. Do your own thing�that�s the law to great art. Who wants another �correct� bull anyway?
Good pupil of the Devil�s that I was, I smiled and pulled back my silly face and gave the clay figure an artist�s scrutinizing look. And went and made the horns five times as thick and long, and the tossing muscle five times as big a ball. Expression. Shape. �That�s another thing,� said the Devil, who was having ideas right along with me. �See, just those pleasing shapes of long cones and big ball can justify a work. You have skillfully reduced the complications of the bull�s anatomy to a few simple shapes. Now that�s art. Congratulations.� And he tapped me on the shoulder, my first admirer.
Those shapes did look interesting�and I decided to remember them for another bull. But this one was neither simple shapes nor correct anatomy�it was just plastic ignorance and I knew it. I mashed the clay into a big lump again, surprised at how easy it was to destroy what it had taken me three or four hours to do. But pleased at the dramatics of my act, which seemed to show character. The artist destroys in one moment his great work in a fit of frustration at not reaching perfection. Hadn�t Michelangelo done that more than once? The Duomo Piet� still misses the leg that he smashed away. Artists are like that.
�You know,� said the Devil. �Maybe you ought to make something else. No one says you have to do a bull, which is very complex. Why don�t you try a man�say, a clown or a beautiful girl. That would sell better anyway.�
But now he wasn�t as convincing�maybe it was the selling remark that made me disgusted. I wasn�t trying to sell anything but to make a wonderful bull. The hell with selling! Maybe later I would do that pretty girl but now I didn�t want to do a pretty girl�I wanted to do a bull, a pretty bull, a terrible bull, a sublime bull. I was in love with bulls. Why couldn�t I show that love in a figure�why?
So I went to get the many bullfight magazines that I had around and looked closely at the pictures of bulls inside. I needed to learn�I didn�t know any more about a bull than a kid does�face it. Most of the photos were not clear but they were better than nothing. And in a dozen afternoons I made half a dozen more clay bulls, constantly consulting those pictures until the magazines were brown and heavy with clay. Meanwhile I had had to learn to make a clay figure that would stand up and stay up without my hand to hold it. I had had to make the incredibly difficult concession of stuffing meaningless clay between its legs to support it. Simplify, said the only book on clay modelling that I could buy. And as examples of good beginner�s simplified sculpture it showed such disgusting figures that I knew I would never simplify so childishly, so destructively. No; I wanted all those pretty muscles I saw in the bull and I didn�t want to streamline or slick over. I loved just those shapes and just that intricate surface and was damneded if I was going to sacrifice them in the name of somebody�s principles of art. The trouble was, to get them pretty�even to get them correct�I needed to know a thousand times more than what I knew then. I needed study.
The Corrals of Bat�n
It was spring and I took my drawing block to the corrals at Batan, just outside of Madrid, where the bulls for the San Isidro Fair, the best bullfights in the world, are brought in and kept for a few days before the fights. I stood at the big white wall and tried to draw the bulls that were not more than five or ten yards away. It was a good idea. For once I could see them up close and have my own notes about particulars such as hooves and ears and horns and tails, but also general views from many sides. This time, unlike my experience with the clay, I learned right off that I wasn�t able to do what I proposed to do: I couldn�t draw. I had already begun to draw in the evenings at the Fine Arts life-drawing sessions and had made some progress. But now, out there on the ranch in the open air with the bulls in front of me, some of them pawing the ground and taking an interest in me too, I couldn�t make pictures of them in my drawing block that would be of much use to me when I modelled. I spent too much time erasing bad lines, wrong proportions.
The bulls kept moving, just when I had gotten down an important line in my block. Models at the Fine Arts sessions stayed stiff for forty-five minutes. These bulls moved all the time, and unexpectedly. I kept starting new pages once the bull had settled into what promised to be a more permanent position. But then it would move. I ended up closing my block and just looking. My drawings were as bad as my clay bulls. I looked hard but knew I wouldn�t remember what I saw. I had already learned that much: that unless you draw it you don�t learn it, you don�t know it.
On a later trip to the corrals I resigned myself to mere taking of notes, some of them written notes as captions to an unsuccessful drawing (�This line goes to here� or �Notice how this basic profile line is made of the loose skin under the neck�). In other cases I drew only parts of parts of the whole or some feature that seemed to surprise me�something I hadn�t seen before. It was all very slow and inadequate, but I had no other tool. Sunning myself in the country outside the city had its own compensations, however, and the bulls were beautiful.
