Lily Brick: "The power of this mountain is indescribable"

The muralist Lily Brick has her heart divided between the power of the Montserrat mountain, her lands in Lleida, and the inspiration she found in Priorat. She explains that she had the privilege of painting an eight-meter-wide mural at the entrance of the Montserrat Art Museum. It was the first time she had been to the magical mountain: “I felt something very strong, the power of this mountain is indescribable. Now I understand why people from all over the world come, they feel attracted to it and return.” This spirituality and the sensation that time stood still accompanied her during the twenty days she was working there. Accustomed to painting outdoors and having the weather end up consuming everything, here she painted indoors reproductions of some of the most significant works in the collection. “They were days of great peace, I understood many things,” she assures. Another of the Lleida muralist's predilections are the regions of Lleida. After having painted in all of them, she has discovered that it is a territory with many contrasts. She likes the extreme yellows it has, and also when it is green, which looks like an infinite sea of fields with the fog rising first thing in the morning. She argues that just as through food you can discover the culture you visit, the land tastes of what happens there, and the landscape also explains who lives there: “The people of Lleida are plain like their orography. It has a lot of immensity, it is a soft land where you can walk, and the people from Lleida are like that, easy-going, cheerful, tempered”. She assures that fortunately the small towns still preserve their authenticity, and that every day she feels more in love, especially with Les Garrigues. He acknowledges that he increasingly likes the relationship between people and landscapes: “As time goes by, I feel more connected to the countryside and seek rooted people, who understand the land and come from it”. Surely this is why he fell so much in love with Priorat. After spending three months painting there, he was surprised to find them familiar, like a kind of cousins of the people from Lleida, “I had the feeling I had known them all my life,” he recalls. He explains that they are as they are, without artifice or layers, with hands dirty from working the land and the vineyard. Seeing and experiencing how wine is made made him love that area. Also special was the ritual he performed first and last thing in the day, going to the very top of La Figuera, the highest part of the region, known as the sentinel of Priorat: “There, under the pine trees, I saw that in a straight line, beyond the mountains and the windmills, you could see La Granadella, which is Lleida, where the Museum and Centre for the Culture of Oil of Catalonia is located”.