Fernando Sordo Juanena

Fernando Sordo Juanena is a Spanish painter based in Toledo, where he taught drawing at the Instituto El Greco. In 1984 he won the blind competition held to decorate a wall measuring 14 by 3.5 metres on calle Sinagoga, in the city's historic core: 33 proposals were entered, five reached the final round, and the jury, which included painter Rafael Canogar, chose his. He painted the mural over roughly a month with help from two art students. The composition stacks a pastel still life of a laid table, a cubist-leaning silhouette of Toledo Cathedral and a tower dissolving into the sky, with the slice of watermelon at street level serving as the work's signature. It remains one of the few pieces of contemporary public art woven into the medieval fabric of Toledo.