Compare New and Old

Well, as promised, here are a few more watercolours from my recent trip to Buenos Aires coupled with a year old series I did on the beaches of Cuba.



This above image was done in the Plaza de Mayo, the red haired guy on the left was Federico, I think he was the producer of aforementioned TV series, he seemed to be a bit of a ring leader. As an aside, you see a great deal of people with red hair in Argentina, that may seem odd or perhaps a skewed result based on the fact that they stand out but hey, ponder this, my cousin is really a red head and her mom is from Argentina....I know!

Anyways, the couple on the right were from Calgary and I think had just arrived in town. I hit my stride with the simple and if i may say elegant profile of the lady's face (i don't remember their names) the guy seemed to like the portrayal of his special lady friend and took a photo and then stood beside her to watch the actor, well, act. I then included him into this painting which I guess looks a bit like a inflated image. He saw himself pictured like Mr. Macho and guffawed, which I think is a great reaction.



So here are some sketches I did on my birthday a year ago on the beach in Cuba, surrounded by rotund Quebec-ers who have zero desire to use a skin cream with a SPF factor. It was lobsterville, for serious. Anyways, this is what got me started on portraying people in this simple style versus using pencil or ink pen sketches. The large block forms and shapes of painting worked more for me, with hints of line drawing.

Plaza de Mayo

With my days in Buenos Aires winding down, I headed to the main square to do some painting. This place is known for protests but not much was going on this day, I think it was a Sunday? Anyways, instead of a protest there were a group of people shooting some sort of revolutionary recreation type thing for TV. Go figure.



If you look on the left hand side of the image, you see the television crew: far left in red is the make-up girl who asked me about immigrating to Canada and if she should go to Montreal; some crew members; the actor is the guy with the outstretched arm and beard; to the right of that the camera person with a 5D and an old lens and sound.

To the right of all that is a group of American tourists who were sitting in the park (actually my starting point, worked the other way across the page) the tourists were de rigueur annoying in the way you expect people to be, lame comments about the city and a insane allegiance to an overuse of the words 'like' and 'dude'.

As an aside, I have to admit that the Moleskine Watercolor Sketchbook has been really terrific for me for the past year: Cuba, Morocco and now Buenos Aires, the paper is great which has been what has been lacking with other Moleskine products for 'arty' pursuits. At some point I will upload these really crude (read rudimentary) paintings I did in Cuba which sort of got me started on this style of character depiction with watercolours.