PICASSO PAINTS GUERNICA

By Robin Laing


They call me Pablo the painter
This land is not my home
But I love my art
So I choose to live
Where the value of art is known


I stand before this canvas
That fills the entire room
And there's a story
I must tell
Of an April afternoon


Far away in the distance
A small speck appears
And like an angry insect
The swelling sound
Of danger death and fear


I close my eyes to remember
Fond images of Spain
Now a tortured
Country tossed
On an endless sea of pain


I see the bulls and the picadors
Blood upon the sand
And my dark-eyed
Senorita with
A candle in her hand


Black bombs come raining
From a silk cerulean sky
And in the smoke, the ash and the flame
The people fall
Scream and choke and cry

   
Guernica calling to the world
Guernica calling to the world
Guernica calling to the world


A newspaper horse is dying
It falls down to the floor
I'll tell this story
In black and white
For sometimes less is more


And I will paint these voices
I hear them in my head
They tell me terror
Stalks the land
And innocence is dead


And all the vibrant colours
As spring returns to Spain
Were blacked out in an instant
And nothing there
Will ever be the same


Guernica calling to the world
Guernica calling to the world
Guernica calling to the world

Listen To Picasso Paints Guernica by Robin Laing on YouTube
Many thanks to Robin Laing for letting us have his lyrics and also the following information which he wrote for the sleeve notes of the Cd coming out on 1st August 2012 from Greentrax recordings: No Pasaran (They shall not pass) - Scots in the Spanish Civil War. http://www.greentrax.com/music/artists/reviews/no-pasaran/


As a student in the 1970's I had a poster of Guernica on my wall but I had no idea that the original painting was about the size of a goal mouth. Much more recently, watching Simon Schama's short BBC film about Picasso and reading Patrick O' Brian's biography of the artist, I came to realise the importance of the painting. Picasso, living in Paris in the spring of 1937, painted it in almost immediate response to an atrocity, in which German aircraft carpet bombed the town of Guernica as a favour to Franco and as a way of testing out Blitzkrieg tactics.