Bulls
His interest in bullfights started on the 15 August 1985 at around 5 a clock pm in Castellar in Andalousia. Georges Guinot went for the first time to see a bull fight, a novillada (a bullfight in wich a novilleros, an aspiring bullfighter not yet a matador, fights an immature or a defective bull) with his friend the aficionado (an enthousisatic supporter) Balthazar Gonzales. He filled up a whole pad of sketches. Then after several ferias (fairs) in Arles, in Vic-Fezansac and in Mont-de-Marsan he produced around 8 pads of sketches and about 50 large and medium size canvases with the following themes: attack, The tercio de piques agony and death. The idea of keeping a diary started from this period.
“
I try by any means to postpone the moment when I’ll have to go back into my ‘toros’.
Everything is ready. I have a month and a half to cover this first stage (45 framed blank canvases). And as always I am shirking… Or else a thousand useless matters but never the less imperative arise…
And then, what I am writing here, is it part of the ‘game’?
„
4th November 1986
“
I think that what is interesting in this series is that it is going towards things about wild beasts and ‘violent deaths’.
Sometimes there are some very beautiful and terrible death throes. Especially the last kill in the afternoon in Santisteban del puerto when the public is already far away… two injured bullfighters, the second who was the seventh and the last in the afternoon, went out carried away to the infirmary of the arenas. Half of the public went out with him…
The bullfighter did not know how to please…. the bull was finally finished off by a designated bullfighter… He died in front of a public standing with their hats already on…
Is this the harshness of the show? Everybody ‘flees’ in the middle of the disaster. Do they even have the feeling that it is a Disaster?
Never mind my theme…I am not painting the public, neither the peonies nor the bullfighters, sometime the picadores. I am not painting the bullfights but may be this spectacular death, programmed, brutal, unavoidable.. A hommage to the most beautiful animal there is, the BULL. May be nothing of this sort but a strange thing happens.
WITHOUT EXPLANATION.
„
5th November 1986
“
Always my ‘Toros’ to depress me… A really difficult and dangerous theme. Be careful not to paint a picture on a box of matches or a poster advertising a bull-fight!
What torture…
I came back into this series last November. Almost a year ago.
„
November 1987
This composition was inspired by the Que tenguas duende ! Written by Yann Ohran; 1997, a book of extracts from the personal diary of Georges Guinot and his sketchbooks on the theme of bullfighting.
L’attaque
Tercio de pique
L’agonie et la mort
