I saw this mural in Alicante a while ago on the facade of one medical centre. It is actually one of the three buildings that make up the hospital whose name we see written here – Vistahermosa. Several departments are located in each building, and this is the one where my husband had his appointment with the anesthesiologist a few days before his surgery. I liked the mural from afar, so I took a picture even though it was not the best angle to do it, given the position of the sun.
When we got closer, I was able to see more details and parts of this large mural. Since it is a tall building, it was not the best for my neck to observe it for a long time. I imagine painting it was more difficult than looking at it, so I am not going to complain.
From here we can better see what this artwork represents. A woman with long, wavy hair, looking at those entering the hospital; one of her eyes is hidden behind a bird. I don't know if the colours faded since this mural was painted or if it was done intentionally, but the woman's skin and the bird's feathers are the same colour, as if they merge. When we look closely, we see that she is looking at us through the bird's eye. A triangle is woven into the composition too, and within it her hair is the colour of honey. Outside the triangle, it is a grey, silver colour. Zooming in on the photo to see the details helped me to read the tag of the artist. Sfhir. - this is his page where you can see some of his other works.
One of the details that caught my attention was the girl's heart. It looks like origami to me, a heart made of paper, and when you look at it from the other side of the wall...
... we see that she is checking her heart with the help of a stethoscope. Oh, and there is another bird there helping to hold the tubing of this same medical tool. What did they hear from her heart? What is the heart saying to them? It was a riddle...
...until I came across a paragraph in the book I finished reading the other day. I will try to bring that part in a few words. A young man, while he was travelling through the desert with the Alchemist, was listening to his heart and sometimes he was talking to it. One night, the young man told the Alchemist that his heart was scared of suffering. The answer was:
"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."
Paulo Coelho's quote from The Alchemist.
Who knows if the artist who painted this mural thought about the heart in this way, about suffering or fears, or none of these. The connection I see (as we all can see what we want in a certain moment in an artwork or in things around us), is that the fear we have when we or people close to us are lacking in health makes things more difficult. I know things will go well; everything will be fine. With that belief, I made a quick decision this afternoon: I will be travelling to be with my family, even though they didn't ask me to.
I hope you also like this mural and that it says something to you as well. Each of us can see it differently; maybe its message is that health comes from listening to our hearts, or that we have to heal our hearts in order to be healthy. Maybe it was simply a coincidence that this mural was painted on the facade of a hospital. In any case, I hope it fits this community, StreetArt. 👋
