‘The jumbled, sometimes washed-out backgrounds – onto which colours seem to have thrown themselves haphazardly while the painter was asleep – invest the canvases with a singular character of something missing, a kind of negative vibration that carries us into an uncomfortable prehistoric domain. ... What these paintings all perform is the opening of a vista into deep, dreamless sleep, a vista into endless darkness. They seem to have been painted with the very stuff of silence.’ ‘Feet on the Ground, Eyes on the Stars’ is not only the phrase Miró used to describe his attitude towards painting (staying both grounded in reality and escaping into an imaginary world of dreams and ideas), but it also gets at two key elements in Miró’s work: grounds and symbols. Today we take a closer look at the backgrounds of a few of the paintings currently on view in our gallery where we can see how Miró begins to use entirely monochrome grounds as the backdrop for his abstractions. They create a sense of endless void and limitless space, imbued with a sense of poetry and imagination. Image 1: Detail, Joan Miró, ‘Deux figures sous la lune’, 1927. Photo by Damian Griffiths. Image 2: Detail, Joan Miró, ‘Peinture,’ 1925. Photo by Annik Wetter. Image 3: Detail, Joan Miró, ‘Le baiser,’ 1924. Image 4: Detail, Joan Miró, ‘Peinture,’ 1926. Photo by Damian Griffiths. Image 5: Detail, Joan Miró, ‘Peinture,’ 1927. Photo by Joseph Jagos.