20 April:Joan Miró

Born on this date in 1893 was Joan Miró, Spanish painter, sculptor and ceramicist.

1. Joan Miró was born in Barcelona, Spain. His father was a watch maker and his mother was a goldsmith.
2. Despite being in creative fields of work themselves, Joan's parents didn't want him to be an artist. They wanted him to get a proper job, so he went to business school and got a job as an accountant. While working as an accountant he used to draw in his account books. He was so badly suited to this kind of work that he eventually suffered a nervous breakdown, at which point his father relented and let him go to art school.
3. Miró's first solo exhibition was in Barcelona in 1918, but it wasn't well received by the critics or the public. His work was ridiculed and vandalised.
4. Two years later, he moved to Paris, drawn to the art scene there where cubism and surrealism were in vogue. He was an admirer of Pablo Picasso, who he'd never met despite the fact their mothers were friends. Picasso was already in Paris, so Miró called on his mother to find out if there was anything he could take with him to give to Pablo. She gave him a cake, which Miró duly delivered and the two artists became lifelong friends.
5. Miró had another famous friend, the writer Ernest Hemingway, who was his boxing partner at a local gym. Hemingway was also a fan of Miró's work. One of his early paintings was called The Farm, which depicted his family's farm in Spain. Miró called it “a summary of my entire life in the countryside”. Hemingway thought it captured the essence of Spain and loved it. He bought it for 5,000 francs as a birthday present for his wife. It's said he wasn't the only person who wanted the picture, and that he had to roll dice with one of his friends for the right to buy it.
6. He married Pilar Juncosa in 1921 and they had one child, a daughter named Dolors.
7. He produced around 2,000 paintings, 500 sculptures, 400 ceramics, 5,000 drawings, 1,000 lithographs, over 250 illustrated books and designed a number of tapestries.
8. He got into tapestry design in 1974 when he was asked to create a tapestry for display in the World Trade Center in New York. As he'd never created a tapestry before, and didn't think he had the required skills, so he declined, but later made one for the hospital which took care of his daughter after an accident. After that, he felt confident enough to team up with Josep Royo to create a tapestry for the World Trade Center. It was one of the most expensive pieces of art lost in the September 11 terrorist attacks.
9. Miró kept on working into his 80s, and his later work was quite experimental - he called it anti-art. He painted with his fingers, stamped on the paintings, cut and even burned them. At 82, he declared that he wasn't producing art for "old dodos" but for the young people of the 21st century. He died of heart failure in 1983, aged 90.
10. He said, "I try to apply colours like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music," and "When I stand in front of a canvas, I never know what I’m going to do – and nobody is more surprised than I at what comes out."

More details about my books. Follow this link if you like Superheroes, Psychics and/or quirky short stories. 

I've listed the themes each novel touches on here for easy reference.

Like my author page on Facebook for news on new books and blog posts.

Follow me on Twitter and Pinterest

Check out my Writing blog