Fundació Joan Miró: the museum where you learn to make a masterpiece with four strokes

What is Fundació Joan Miró and where does it come from?

Joan Miró founded the Fundació Joan Miró in 1971 during his lifetime — a rare case of a living artist creating his own institution to preserve and share his work. Miró chose the architect Josep Lluís Sert, his friend, to design the building. Sert (who also designed the United Nations Palace and Picasso's studio in Mougins) built a white volume with skylights that let natural light fall on the paintings — the first time in Spain that a building was specifically conceived as a container for contemporary work. Miró donated his entire personal collection. The foundation was inaugurated in 1975 with the dictator Franco still in power, in an act that was also a political manifesto.

Why go — and what's the purpose of your appointment with the artist?

Miró is proof that art can be radically simple. La Sèrie Barcelona — black and white lithographs made in the postwar 1940s, with four strokes each — are the best visual lesson against perfectionism there is. Count the strokes of the first painting: seven come out. You learn that you can make a masterpiece with four strokes if you have worked for fifty years synthesizing.

How to take advantage of it (concrete practice)

Stay in front of the Barcelona Series. Count the strokes. Take your notebook and try this: for ten minutes, draw with less. A face with three strokes. A landscape with two. You will learn more about creativity in those ten minutes than in six months of online courses. Afterwards, go up to the terrace — Miró worked on sculpture in the last years of his life, and the foundation exhibits large-format sculptures under the sky of Montjuïc, with views of the city. Stay twenty minutes. Draw one of them. You come home with something.

Why this place connects with Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way

The practice of the appointment with the artist that Julia Cameron prescribes in The Artist's Path has a principle: creativity needs to be fed before I can produce. Cameron calls it 'filling the well.' The metaphor is exact: if it doesn't rain, the well runs dry. If you don't expose your brain to non-work stimuli once a week, your ability to generate new ideas quietly declines, week by week.

Fundació Joan Miró is an ideal place for a date with the artist because it meets the three conditions that Cameron asks for: It takes you out of your routine (a place other than your work and home), does not require production (you are going to receive, not create), and exposes you to curated stimuli (someone with judgment decided this was worth watching). Three conditions, an hour or two, once a week. It is probably the practice with the best mental ROI that you are going to add to your routine.

If you haven't taken the course yet, this is the place to start. Your Artist's Path is the free 12-week program that applies Julia Cameron's method to your life — including two hours a week blocked off on your calendar for appointments like this. More about the course at the end of the post.