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I might actually get a chance to finish off all the Bilbao posts that I wanted to make, rather than leaving matters in their usual half finished state. Anyway, I have a slight obsession with metro systems and I felt the need to use the one in Bilbao.

The network is relatively new, opening on 11 November 1995, but it has developed as a very useful rapid transport system for the city. The first line connected Bilbao with communities along the right bank of the estuary, reusing parts of older suburban railway routes, before later extensions pushed the network further through the metropolitan area. Its most famous design feature is the work of Norman Foster, whose glass station entrances became known as “Fosteritos”, or, in short, an entrance to a hole in the ground.

I rather like this photo and its perspective, it’s rare to be able to get a vantage point such as this. I suspect that I enjoy transport infrastructure a little more than is socially necessary, but it is too late to build a more normal personality now.

The station was functional and clean. My journey was from the central railway station’s metro stop at Abando to Areeta, which was on Metro Line 1.

The trains ran on a regular basis every five or six minutes, so I didn’t have long to wait for this one. There was also plenty of seating for waiting passengers, so it was all sufficiently comfortable. It did feel like a transport system that was designed on the radical assumption that people might want to use it.

The network felt relatively busy and it took me a little while to get a seat.

And safely at Areeta station which serves the Getxo area of the city, near the transporter bridge which is what I was aiming to visit. It was all efficient and organised, but perhaps the main thing to note is that the journey cost just over €1 which is a third of the price that it would be on the overpriced London Underground. There’s a wider question about why London transport pricing is now almost out of control, people should be able to afford to use public transport although this is perhaps a little political for this blog.

This untitled work by Etel Adnan was painted in 2014 and I had absolutely no idea what it was meant to be. It appears to be little more than bands of colour, two orange hills, a blue line and a green foreground. That completes my art review and I think we can all agree it has been an intellectually demanding paragraph.

As an aside, this is precisely the sort of thing that actually invites slightly dangerous thoughts in my mind which are mostly relating to ideas that I could have painted this If I had attempted something similar, I suspect I would have felt a growing need to add a tree, then a little bird, then perhaps a path, then possibly a distant cottage, until the whole thing had turned into a confused countryside scene with a slightly badly drawn craft beer bar in it. Adnan, by contrast, knew when to stop.

Adnan (1925-2021) was a Lebanese-American artist and she was known for artworks in this style. It’s a rather lovely looking painting in many ways if I don’t try and understand it, using bold colours and minimising on the faffing around. But it was the artist who I found particularly interesting and there’s a limit of what I can write about this artwork anyway.

She was born in Beirut to a Syrian Muslim father and Greek Orthodox mother, grew up across languages and cultures, studied philosophy in Paris, Berkeley and Harvard, then taught philosophy in California from 1958 to 1972. She also worked as a journalist and cultural editor for Al Safa in Beirut, writing political editorials and she also wrote for The Post-Apollo Press. I’d say that’s a high achiever.

That feels like quite a mix of different talents and I rather like that she taught philosophy for many years. It’s quite an appealing artwork in many ways, simplistic as it might be, but it was created by someone who clearly had a formidable talent. And it probably didn’t need a little bird, cottage or a craft beer bar.

As it was so cheap to cross the Bizkaia Bridge in Bilbao, around 85p, I thought that I’d try the experience. There’s an option to walk across the top for €10, but I was content with my choice. It only takes a minute or so and it all feels smooth. It can also carry a surprising amount of weight including relatively large numbers of pedestrians and also cars.

And here’s the riveting video of the crossing. I appreciate that a short film of a bridge moving sideways across water may not trouble the awards season, but it does at least document the event for my two loyal blog readers, who I am sure have been waiting patiently for more suspended transporter bridge content.

This small painting is ‘A Memory’ by Eduardo Zamacois (1841-1871), painted in 1864, and it is easy at first to treat it as a modest little work in a rather splendid frame. And that’s fairly accurate, as the artist specialised in these little paintings, although the frame feels as if it had somewhat grander ambitions.

As is rather obvious to anyone looking at it, which I find is often a useful feature in art, the painting shows a figure standing beside a tree, apparently carving or marking something into the bark, with the title suggesting remembrance, affection or loss. It also seems to me, with my limited artistic knowledge and considerable confidence in deploying it, like a rather more modern painting than it actually is.

What makes it perhaps more poignant is the artist’s own short life. Zamacois was born in Bilbao in 1841, trained in Madrid and then moved to Paris, where he became successful at a notably young age. He was part of that nineteenth-century world of ambitious painters, salons, commissions and carefully observed genre scenes, and he seemed to be building exactly the sort of career that might have made him a much more prominent figure in European art. Then, rather inconveniently for art history and indeed even more inconveniently for himself, he died in Madrid in 1871 at the age of just 29.

If he had lived into middle age, he might have developed into a major Spanish or Basque painter of genre scenes, or perhaps moved in new directions as the art world changed around him. Perhaps this makes the title of the artwork even more poignant.

Conscious of the limitations of using AI, I wanted to use it here to see what the main character of the artwork might have looked like in the artist’s mind. I’d say that seems to be a good approximation although the graffiti seems a bit cruder than in the original.