Visits to the Artisans

Observe Seville’s finest artisans practicing traditional Spanish crafts that have been lost in most other parts of the world. On this half-day tour, you will visit the workshop of a silversmith, where you will learn the process of how the intricate silver religious items are designed and crafted by hand. You will then see a sculptor chiseling life-size statues out of wood and forming images out of clay, before visiting a ceramics shop where the tiles, vases, plates, and sinks typical to the Mediterranean region are molded and painted. You will also talk with a guitar maker, who will show you how thin wood planks are bent and assembled to form the rich-sounding guitars so important to the music of the Spanish culture. Includes: guide/translator and lunch.

Because I did a lot of very interesting things here last week, I’m going to write about a few of them before returning to my reader’s choice posts. Last week the week-long holiday of Feria took place, which I’ll describe more of later. But you ask, how can Sevilla have two week-long holidays with only two weeks between them? Simply because it’s Spain, ha. But this one is a little different because most people still have to work most the week in the mornings, so they go to the Feria from the afternoons until almost dawn. So not too much actually gets done at work during the week. I was one of those who had to work most the week too, even though I didn’t have classes. But we tried to make a couple days a little more interesting than usual.
I mostly work with Experience Seville, the personalized tourism business my boss is setting up to bring upper-class Americans and Europeans to spend 5-7 days in Sevilla. I usually just work on writing descriptions of activities, amenities, food, and hotels, creating files of the descriptions and fotos for the website, and making charts to compare prices, but once in a while I get to serve as the official photographer. That is by far my favorite part. I have taken photos of one hotel and a couple restaurants, as well as a flamenco show and a couple of artisans. It can be pretty cool because they usually give me free reign to take as many pictures as I like, but it can be kind of difficult to tell people in Spanish exactly where I want them to get a good shot (aka chefs in a kitchen assembling delicacies I can’t tell from the scraps).
Last Wednesday we went to visit several artisans, so I got to experience the artistic side of Sevilla’s culture. All the ones we saw were in Triana, the area of town across the river that centuries ago was where all the fisherman and ceramic artists were located. We first visited an ofebre, or a silver and goldsmith. He and his assistant showed us how they draw detailed sketches (which are art in themselves), use them to make templates to put over thin sheets of metal, copy the design onto the metal by punching it with a tiny, sharp tool, and then form the figure with tiny hammers and saws. The largest demand for artistic products here is still for religious objects like the crowns and decorations around the virgin in cathedrals, and the pasos and scepters used in processions like Semana Santa, Corpus Cristi, and el Rocio. But in their spare time they also like to experiment with more modern figures of people and designs from Picasso (another great Spanish artist).
We then went with the orfebre to visit his friend the sculptor, who showed us huge sculptures of people made from wood, and statues of virgins and heads made from clay. Once again, most were for Biblical or religious scenes, and all were incredibly detailed.
We also visited a ceramics shop and a guitar maker, but we did not get to see too much of their shops. My señora does ceramics and paints, but I’ll write more about that later. I did, however, look around the guitar shop enough to see guitars in various stages of assembly, and the lutier bending wood to form the outside of a guitar. (I miss my guitar a lot.) It was very neat to see how artisans here continue to make things by hand when most of the world now does it with machines. Many of these artisans learned their trade at a young age, and many times it has been in their family for many years. They were all really nice folks; in fact, the ofebre offered to let Malory marry his grandson tomorrow.
If you would like any pictures taken, particularly in Spain, I am now in business. Picture count since January: 3138. Lindsay :^)