Painting Openings and Life Drawing, Barcelona

A reader scanning Barcelona for something painting-related to attend finds exhibitions, private views, life drawing sessions and open studios listed here, each entered by whoever is putting it on. Barcelona Artists carries what members post about painting across the city, written in the organiser's own words rather than a house style. The vocabulary stays close to how painters talk about their own calendar, where an opening reads differently from a private view, and a life drawing session is neither one.

Painting's year in Barcelona bends around institutions that carry the discipline through it: MACBA for the contemporary end, the Fundació Joan Miró, and the Museu Picasso. The same mechanism holds under each one: painting happens out of sight until a body of work is ready, and an opening is the moment it meets a wall and a room of people at once. A private view entered by an individual member sits inside that same mechanism, whatever scale the show happens to be.

Turning up to a painting opening in Barcelona works the way a private view works anywhere: it runs for an evening, and it is the point in the run when the painter is reliably standing in the room rather than working elsewhere, which makes the quieter days after better for looking closely at the work without a crowd in front of the canvas. Life drawing sits at the other end of the format, where a model holds a pose and whoever organised the sitting sets the length and the breaks.

Anyone with an account can put a painting date on Barcelona Artists, whether they hold the artist role or not, and the listing stays theirs to keep current as the show changes. A visitor narrowing by style finds the same range members post in, from figurative painting to full abstraction, without the page promising more than what they have chosen to post. Painters keep profiles here too, with the finished work behind their names and the classes some of them teach.