Lugares que ya no existen

Esto son un par de dobles páginas de mi cuaderno de garabatos, el que uso todos los días, casi no saco a la calle y no tiene ni un dibujo del natural (como no sea de la tele), tan sólo bocetos de trabajo, experimentos y zarandajas varias. Como por ejemplo esta serie de imágenes recordadas de la casa de mis abuelos,  en la Colonia de Mahou (o "del Mahou", como solían llamarla sus habitantes), un sitio que frecuenté mucho en épocas remotas y que fue derribado completamente en los primeros ochenta para construir bloques de pisos.
En flickr hay imágenes tamaño legible para curiosos y aventureros.

28.08.2013
La semana pasada le mostré estas páginas a mi padre y las reconoció inmediatamente. Empezó a hacerme alguna corrección pero luego cayó en la cuenta de que mientras mis recuerdos son de los años '70, los suyos habían quedado fijados incluso 20 años antes, en la época anterior a mi nacimiento y a algunas reformas que yo conocí ya realizadas. Luego fue reconstruyendo todo mientras se maravillaba por no haber conservado en su memoria las imágenes más recientes sino otras mucho más remotas.



Places that do not exist anymore

These are a pair of spreads of my scribble sketchbook, the one I use everyday, I almost never take out from home and that has not even one drawing from life (from TV at the most). It has just sketches for work, experiments and silly things as this series of images from memory of the house of my grandparents, a place I used to go in remote times and that was demolished in the first eighties to build apartment blocks.

There are some images at a legible size (in spanish) on flickr for daring curious.

28.08.2013
Last week I showed this pages to my father and he recognized the places immediately. He started proposing corrections but suddenly he realized that, while my memories were all from the 70's, his had remained fixed even 20 years before, in the period previous to my birth and to some alterations that I knew already made. Then he started reconstructing everything, wondering at how he couldn't remember the most recent images but others much older.

Santo Domingo aperitif

Esto es sólo un aperitivo de lo que me he traído de Santo Domingo en el cuaderno: Lapin y Swasky que dormían como ceporros (y yo apretujado entre ellos dibujando) durante el último tramo entre Madrid y Barcelona.
Más en los próximos días.

This is just an aperitif of what I've carried from Santo Domingo inside my sketchbook: Lapin and Swasky sleeping like logs (and me between them drawing) on the last stretch between Madrid and Barcelona.
More on the next days. 

Hometown and brushes

On my last trip to Madrid a couple of weeks ago, apart from shooting some of my old and almost forgotten works (they are shown on the previous 2 posts), I found some opportunities to take some sketches.
I made this at the boarding gate of the airport before the depart from Bologna. I used my new Niji brush, India ink and watercolors over a rough made with a ballpoint pen.

I made 2 sketches of my mother: she's alone on the first one...

...and with my son Fabio on the second one. Both were made with the same ballpoint pen and watercolors, but I used the ink brush just on the last one.

This is the Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas which is supposed to mean for bullfighting the same as the Teatro alla Scala means for opera. I've never been too interested in bullfighting so I've never payed too much attention to this building when I used to live in Madrid, but when I passed by the other day I couldn't not to draw it.

Drawing directly with brushes is something like riding a roller coaster: there's some fear before but so much satisfaction after. The problem for me is that the comparison would be better with parachutes than with roller coasters: the fear often blocks me and I need some rough or guidelines under before I take the brush. It's because of this that I admire so much artists like Gabi Campanario or Enrique Flores.
After almost one year of comments and messages, I met Enrique for the first time on this trip (we had a fantastic lunch that lasted... over midnight!). As a result of this long and funny conversation... I finally jumped for the first time. Thank you, Enrique!
These were my first straight-with-the-brush sketches, made on the plane turning back home. From then on I haven't stopped "jumping", soon I'll let you see.