José F. Grave de Peralta
Autorretratos ~~~~ Self-portaits
Self-portrait with Italian air / Con aire italiano
Salamanca, Spain -- November 1973
pencil
10" x 14"
Reading many many books, as I was in those college days at St. John's, and quite a bit of soul-searching or READING of self, went hand in hand. The first of these attempts of picturing myself in 1973, when I was fortunate to spend one year in Salamanca, Spain, and thus take a year off from the SJC curriculum and work, portrays a very serene air about me, recently arrived in Europe, and determined to read Cervantes' Don Quixote in the original Spanish, as well as other works of Castillian literature. The year 1973 was still the time of Francisco Franco.
Photo 3
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: The Golden Age
4 ' x 4 '
oil on canvas
2001
(NOTE: the portrait of Dan Q and Sancho Panza date to 2001!)
The other self-portraits that follow, below, tell other things about me and the context and spirit of the time when I looked in the mirror to read who I was, or thought then that I was.
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I was deeply impressed in those days, too, by the life-story of and letters written by VINCENT VAN GOGH, and managed in those days to travel to ARLES, France, to visit the houses where the painter had lived, and the streets he had walked in search for answers regarding relationships, painting techniques, and existence.
A prior Self-portrait, remembering stories of the heart left behind as questions at St. John's
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Salamanca, Spain -- October 1973
pencil
9" x 12"
Self-portrait
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Salamanca, Spain -- December 1973
pen and ink
6 1/2" x 7"
In Salamanca I studied several courses of Theology at the Jesuit Universidad Pontificia, not far from where I rented my room from a Spaniard from the Basque region who was writing his doctoral thesis for a degree in theology about a correspondence between two great philosophers of the 1700's on many subjects, but ultimately on the knowledge of God from the study of SCIENCE : Alfonso Perez de Laborda, my landlord, talked to me quite often about his thesis, and I tried, hard as I could, to relate my much more modest reading level of the curriculum of St. John's College' "Great Books Program" to the various topics that Alfonso addressed. We once made a very unforgettable weekend trip to the mountain regions near El Escorial and Salamanca itself, staying in inns which seemed to be pages of those described in Don Quixote, and running in those very archaic mountainscapes into old women goatherds with their flocks, and miles and miles of "encina" oak trees that stretched deep into the Castilla of the mother language that I was wanting to understand, beyond verbs, and beyond novels Cervantine. When Alfonso and I parted ways for many years, he gave me as a gift the leather-bound AGUILAR edition of the Complete poems, essays, plays, and sketches by FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA, and he wrote in his dedication: "Para que siempre lo leas con fruición"--- So you may always read this with fruition.
Self-portrait
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Salamanca, Spain -- December 1973
pen and ink
6 1/2" x 7"
The portait directly above the text here, I dedicated thus along with my signature. "To my father on the Feast of St. Joseph, 1974" -- . My parents framed and hung this in our family home in Wilmington, Delaware, and it has followed me to Rome, almost miraculously, thanks to my niece Carolina Copello, who saved it from the disastruous warehouse where I left it and so many other drawings and books when I moved to Rome in 2008.
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While I lived in Salamanca my parents and I wrote letters to each other weekly. Most of my letters were written to each of them separately, and my mother saved in a large black binder the letters I wrote them in this period. A few months before she passed away in Miami, she had me take a small suitcase filled with our family photos from Cuba, which my grandmother painstakingly mailed to us in the U.S., even as the Cuban regime opened all our mail as a matter of Communist course, and even intercepted correspondence. When I read my letters in the binder, the emotion is too deep, too historical, about us as a family.
Self-portrait with pastel box
(life-size dimensions)
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Miami, Florida -- 1982
pastel
30" x 60"
Self-portrait in my Rome studio, PIRAMIDE Neighborhood
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Rome-- 2009
conté crayon
24" x 30"
