A Beautiful Bilbao Birthday: turning 35 with art and arroz con leche
With Helen Frankenthaler and a 106-year-old lunch date—there isn't enough time for absorbing all of the world's beauty!
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It has taken me an entire month to write this! In mid-April, I celebrated a milestone birthday by sharing a creative group writing project and taking an overnight trip to Bilbao, Spain, with l’homme de ma vie.
Bilbao’s a city I’ve always wondered about, mostly because of its biggest art-related draw: the Museo Guggenheim. After moving to the Basque Country, my motivation to visit skyrocketed. It’s recognized as the largest and most culturally significant city in the Basque Country—surprising to me, as I always assumed it was San Sebastián! A birthday seemed like a great excuse to finally get the heck over there.
The Basque city along the Nervión River
After our 1.5-hour drive from our home near the French-Spanish border, we arrived curiously in Bilbao. Based on my visits to Barcelona and San Sebastián, I was clearly excited to experience more big-city Spanish flair. There’s a bit of emphatic gusto peppered throughout the culture of Spain that can often feel lacking in France. Same for America. We parked our car, left our bags at the hotel, and immediately set off to explore by foot.
The river winds through this electric place. It’s not quite as photogenic here by day, mostly due to the greenish-sludgy hue of the water. But by night, the city rivaled other romantic and creative river-centric towns I’ve visited, like Paris or Basel. There were people truly everywhere, their tempos fast.
What pictures fail to capture (but I’ll tell you anyway because it’s important to give glimpses into real human moments) is that most of this trip centered around the state of our feet. Mine with blistered toes, him still nursing an ankle burn from his motorcycle’s exhaust pipe. We pushed our bodies to their limits that day, trying to touch as much ground as possible in 30ish hours. A portion of our exploring was asking sympathetic locals for specific types of bandaids, feeling victorious as we wrapped ourselves in the right kinds. This felt like an obsession. Mostly because we scheduled an intense hike the next day—something like a mini pilgrimage. More on that below!
Living for 106 years
Whenever we travel, we aim for a nice balance of solid plans and spontaneity. Usually, I like to book the transportation and where I’m laying my head to sleep. Maybe a museum or tickets to a house tour. Otherwise, everything is guided by feelings and what comes up while moving.
Café Iruña was a rare planned-in-advance stop, as I was looking for a place with maximum culture and patina. Every inch of the restaurant was covered in both. Historic murals of Spain everywhere, suspended chandeliers that recalled an Indian palace, hand-painted square tiles along the lower third of the walls, detailed columns, a mezzanine perfect for spying while eating tapas (“pintxos” in Basque), flooring so attractive that you’d want to kiss it, heavy carved seats. A real place of artistry. The food could have been spoiled and the visual experience would still have left me feeling gleeful.
Thankfully, the food was GOOD! I ordered what I thought was chicken (gallo, which translates in French and English to rooster). The waiter hurriedly abandoned a flat and yellowed fish just above my lap. Confusion! Is chicken fish? Is fish chicken? In Spain, I had lost all of my basics.
I heard a polite voice asking me for my attention in English. Surprised, I looked toward the 50s-something couple at the table next to us. “Sorry, where was the fish on the menu? We feel quite confused!” Jb and I sighed with relief, and the four of us began laughing as we all made the same mistake. Gallo was Sol, the fish. My first question for them was: “Are you Scottish, by chance?” They were, and they lived incredibly close to where my maternal ancestors lived.* We shared a beautiful conversation, they ended their meal, and left to enjoy their vacation.
Another couple replaced them quickly. By then, I had inhaled my chicken-fish and we were beginning dessert. The best arroz con leche I’ve ever eaten! Of the two, the man was tall and sturdy with silver-rimmed glasses and pleated trousers. The woman was his opposite: impossibly petite and delicately frail. They sat on the booth side of the table together.
With his voice booming and welcoming, he leaned over to our table to say something to us in Spanish. My husband is outstandingly good at languages. No matter where we are, he knows way more than he lets on, and he picks up new vocabulary and accents insanely fast. The strangers could tell right away that we were not Spanish, and instead of giving up, the four of us persisted to connect. For about 15 or 20 minutes, we talked with the two of them in a combination of English, French, Spanish, and Basque. If one of us knew a word, we could translate it to someone else, who could switch it into a third language. Our hand gestures also helped. We learned: the man was 75, the woman, his mother, was 106. ONE HUNDRED AND SIX? We had to use our fingers to be sure we were understanding correctly. I told them it was my 35th birthday. The woman reached out to me. We spent a moment gently squeezing each other’s hands and speaking with our smiling eyes, loudly. There was so much tenderness in their messages and their movements.
*This is a story I am dying to write, but it has taken me two years because of how close the subject is to my heart!!!
Café Irwas opened in 1903. Its slogan is: “for a century, with pleasure.” This woman was also a century old, and still living with a lightness. After that level of nostalgia and the food, we left our Spanish elders. We waved with huge smiles at the two of them through the windows as we became disappearing, youthful figures on the sidewalk.
Museo Guggenheim
The star of this show—at least originally, before meeting someone who is over a century old—is the Guggenheim Bilbao. In my art history courses, what feels like ages ago, I remember teachers showing Jeff Koons’s oversized landscape sculpture, Puppy (1992), as if it were art history’s contemporary mascot. Although totally kitschy in my eyes, it was so nice to see it in person. Its greenery and my hair blowing together in the wind.
The Guggenheim Bilbao was designed by post-modernist wacko Frank Gehry in 1997. I always appreciate Gehry’s uniqueness, and there’s a sentimental aspect to his work as other buildings of a similar style have been a part of my daily life in mutiple cities (like: LA’s Disney Concert Hall, which I parked underneath every time I volunteered at MOCA, Vitra Design Museum in Germany which is related to my job, and Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture which I lived just blocks from for a year and a half). I like these undulating, reflective exteriors, but his interiors leave me totally baffled. There are often risky moments in the architecture that look sloppy and thrown together. For this museum, I was impressed that the stone on the bottom portion of the building came from Spanish quarries in Granada. Not Basque, but at least Spanish—and unique from the other Gehry buildings I’ve experienced!
Breaking the rules à la Helen Frankenthaler
When I had the idea to visit the Guggenheim Bilbao on my birthday, I didn’t yet realize that the traveling exhibition, Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules, was opening exactly on that day. I sat up straight in my chair and cheered to myself. Helen!
The show was contained compared to the overall footprint of the museum, but the gigantic scale of her oil paintings made it seem the opposite. It was a delight to stand closely to each canvas. Tall-me shrank next to them.
It’s funny, because now, while viewing the webpage dedicated to the exhibition, they have a video that perfectly captures what it feels like to be immersed in each painting. You’re inside each canvas’s atmosphere, and they’re all so different.
The exhibition catalog—which I recommend picking up a copy of—is just as powerful as Helen herself. It speaks of how Frankenthaler pushed the boundaries of painting in ways of gender (although this deeply bothered her—she wasn’t a woman artist, she was an artist), material, subject matter, and spirit. There are plentiful pictures of her canvases and oversized drawings, of course; correspondence and notes; and a lengthy biography by Douglas Dreishpoon. What ignites me about Helen mostly—and the catalog covers this—is her solid sense of self. Her ability to incessantly march at her own pace. She changed the history of art thanks to this unshakeable selfhood.
Tarsila do Amaral
After soaking in Helen’s watered paintings, I floated over to this particular photo mural. Instantly, I wanted to know who this woman was. Tarsila do Amaral.
Best known as Tarsila, she was a Brazilian modern-era painter who found herself in the avant-garde circles of Paris and São Paulo. The Guggenheim Bilbao describes her as, “the creator of an original and evocative work, drawing on the indigenistic and popular imaginations as well as from the modernizing instances of a country in full transformation.” Her work in some chapters reflected an appreciation of what was considered “primitive” in art—her paintings and drawings evoke this in their forms and subject matter. In other works of hers, blocked buildings start appearing, fighting for attention among the natural scapes.
“A Brazilian painter with multiple shades and contours, she has been able to carry her culture through canvases with gigantism and amazing dreamlike shapes. A true reflection of a creative personality, her work has changed over the decades from carelessness to a sometimes controversial political commitment. In a country where colonialism has blurred identities, the artist has drawn a world in her image where dream and reality are intertwined.
‘This European retrospective cannot ignore the ‘globalized’, ‘connected’ and ‘decolonial’ approaches to art history, nor the contribution of gender studies that have largely refreshed critical and historiographical discourses in recent decades,’ says Cecilia Braschi, curator of the exhibition.”
Literally a day or two after this introduction to Tarsila, my friend
sent me the draft of our Substack collaboration. She had written beautifully of Tarsila’s work and was planning to see the Guggenheim Bilbao show when she was in town. Friend fate!A sneaky Kusama
Jb had never been in a Yayoi Kusama firefly installation, so I pulled his hand until we were standing in line for the timed experience. I described it briefly as we waited. The museum employee who managed the room began to speak to us in French. We were confused at first because we were talking in English. “I heard his accent,” he said of my husband. We shared a nice moment with him. Then, we stepped into the room, expecting to have ten others with us, like the other time slots had.
As soon as Jb and I entered, the man held his arm out firmly, strongly blocking the people behind us in line and quickly slammed the door. “We’re in here alone!!!” We were like little kids, spinning and laughing. He gave us way more time than usual.
When we left, I exclaimed to him in French, “Thank you! It’s my birthday and this was a beautiful gift!” He was cheerful. We made each other’s day brighter—spots of extra light—just like the box we just stumbled out of.
Unexpected emotions by evening
Every birthday, I’ve been more energized and proud of getting older. Secretly, I hope that an extra year will make people take me and my standard giggling/goofiness a little more seriously. This year, by the end of the day, I began to cry. There’s so much goodness that I’ve experienced in my thirty-five years. I have no idea how many more years I’ll be lucky to have. There is an impossible amount of cheer, love, beauty, language, food, people, etc. that I still want to sponge up. I feel time slipping away too quickly already, and 35 is still young!
This is when I began spiraling. What if I have the absolute chance to turn 106 years old? And when I get to that age, what if I have this overwhelming sense of unfairness because life is ending soon? Really, it’s my time to go? I don’t want to go! There’s so much left to do! Time went too fast! It’s tough to admit publicly, but I’ve experienced huge waves of grief, exhaustion, and depression in the last year or two, despite living out my most unthinkable and wonderful dreams. So, having these confusing almost-midnight thoughts seemed normal. But actually, they reminded me that I’m still my shining, energetic, grateful, brave, optimistic, strong self. That I’m thankful to be breathing, experiencing, and expanding. Perhaps our lunchtime meeting with the-oldest-person-on-Earth prompted this soft moment of tears. I’m thankful for her, too, and I’ll never forget her light.
The Pilgrimage-like Steps of Gaztelugatxe
With feet and hearts renewed the next morning, we drove in the direction of home, toward our anticipated hike at San Juan de Gaztelugatxe.* The goal was reaching a 10th-century hermitage precariously built atop an island surrounded by steep bluffs of rock. This name in Basque roughly translates to inaccessible rock castle. Fitting!
*I discovered this hike thanks to a group chat on Ali LaBelle’s À La Carte! If you want to visit, please make sure to reserve your free spot—they like to control the crowds.
To access it, you must descend to the water’s edge and zigzag up a steep incline of pebbled stone stairs. It began misting rain at the beginning of our trip, making the journey dangerously slippery. Maybe 10th-century shoes were more cut out for this? We were happy, though, because it meant the crowds disappeared and we had the place practically to ourselves.
Like trying to photograph the moon, taking pictures of this place doesn’t give an accurate sense of scale or beauty. The landscape looks small when in fact, you’re the impossibly tiny one. Exactly like my experience of Helen’s paintings.
At the end, my phone recorded 66 stories climbed! An hour and a half of being in awe of nature, wondering if we were secretly in Scotland, and cheering ourselves on.
All of this was an unimaginable way to start my 35th year. ❥
If you enjoyed these words, you might enjoy a similar writing centered on Venice, Italy. No surprise: I cried there, too.
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Kelsey Rose
Kelsey this is all so beautiful. I loved your restaurant experience with the 106 (!!!) year-old woman. I turn 56 in December and that makes me feel young! I know those late night thoughts that you speak of too. ❤️ Wanting to have enough time to experience so much joy. And I love that you got to experience all of those Helen Frankenthaker paintings!!! — how cool! Happy Birthday ❤️
What an amazing trip! Happiest of birthdays to you ✨ I hope the blisters and and ankle are on the mend X