An eclipse weekend

Eclipse

Last weekend I went to the second edition of Festival de Jazz e Música Improvisada da Parede. 

Here are some of the drawings I have made, enjoy seeing them! 

This one is Ricardo Ribeiro and was made with both my left and right hand, drawing at the same time. Ricardo's portrait is about a construction of two things happening at the same time, music on one side, poetry on another. 

This one is Jorge Nuno, the guitarist from Signs of the Silhouette. This concert and this music was about the strength of the bones, the crack of bones, the smoke puff in between...

Not often do I make drawings of persons who had made portraits from me. And that was that case here. Miguel Lopes, a.k.a. Miguel Fascinado is a visual artist, a brilliant photographer with a sense of composition from a painter. I was mesmerized with the images he was doing during Signs of the Silhouette concert. It's not about the world, it is about how you see it, how you frame it, how you attribute colors with an etherial quality, with such beauty, grace and poetry. 

I envisioned Ricardo Jacinto being a tree with the posture of a cello player. I wanted this drawing to have a certain roughness to it, some stiffness on the roots, and leafs growing from his hands. That's what he does - grows things from his hands. 

This drawing was made in the first concert of the festival, in a moment of inspiration for me. 

 Abdul Moimême is spinning a top, in a distant desert, with one hand and, bringing forward other stuff, from Smup's stage curtains - what I call here, his traveller luggage, represented by the diverse shapes and colors of the pattern. This drawing is about the axis of the places we carry with ourselves, the emotional luggage we bring from those, in everything we do. It's about Abdul being there, playing, and portraying so many other faraway places, at the same time. 

This one is the violinist Maria do Mar. I have done some other portraits of her (please see here and here), but I kind of feel this one is the fairest of them, so far. Maria has such a special name that she doesn't need to use her surname. The name Maria d-o M-a-r (from the sea) carries the ocean and the breeze of the beach with it, and this time, I wanted that wave movement in her portrait. Plus, with the line that comes from her shoulder is written imensa (immense) and that is exactly what she is, a force of nature, a larger that life person. 

Volte-Face

It is nothing very common, but I can point out three of four concerts where I was, and due to it, an important catharsis happened with me.
In all those important moments, I felt a switch was turned on in my head and nothing was like as it used to be, afterwords. 

This drawing is the testimony of one of those rare moments. It was the concert Maria Radich and José Bruno Parrinha gave. Their music extension was very deep in me, and led me to be writing almost the whole time of their performance.
On this one, I wanted the text to be its main feature (I called it Volte-Face), not the drawing itself. The colors chosen regard to the text too, both Maria and Bruno have colors flowers and gardens have (or so that was my inspiration). The background color regards to the city references in the text: the streets and the corner that led me to the stone, the construction, the pavement, the smog, the pale grey.

It's written:

Dos laços e dos escassos, 

Vais a braços ou embaraços,

Erros crassos ou maravilhosos jardins lassos.

São pequeninos passos, ruas de brutal enlace, de volte-face,

na esquina de um tal país,

sem línguas no que diz,

de rápido rumo e aprumo,

É sumo na vida,

É rumo de sonhos,

De cascas com cor,

De raspas com amor. 

It's very hard to do a perfect accurate translation of this text, but here's a possible one:

From the ties and the scarce

Going forcibly or embarrassedly,

Crass errors or wonderful loose gardens.

These are little steps, streets of brutal connection, of a change to come,

on the corner of such a country,

without languages in what it says,

of fast rhumb and poise,

It's juice in life,

It's course of dreams, 

Of peels with color,

of zest with love.

"My drawing festival" ended up with the first drawing of this post, Eclipse. 

It was made afterwards all concerts where finished, when the moon was huge, we were all talking in the courtyard, and I looked to Paulo Curado's blue drinking ticket and asked him if I could have it, he said ok and asked if I wanted to drink something with it, but I had other plans for what that was, the beginning of this drawing. Even though he played, this time, I didn't make any portrait of Paulo, but, as he was my kind of maecenas and I made this drawing as a gift to him, I included something I connect to Paulo Curado: seagulls. It was a drawing made with both my right and left hand. 

In the end, this Eclipse drawing summed up all the textures, colors and richness of this festival. A bottle of oxygen, these days...

Thank you Rui Eduardo Paes for trusting my work, for choosing an auspicious date, for programming, inviting and choosing such a nice venue to do this Festival. It was great!