segunda-feira, 16 de dezembro de 2019

Sketching along the pista #4



Manga or Pessoa? This is the difficult choice at Évora’s Fonte de Letras, where artists’ books sit alongside quality fiction and non-fiction, coffee ready at hand. The stock appears seemingly random in its display but on closer inspection is carefully ordered, with furniture and book displays performing a carefully choreographed dance. The ceiling, with its electrical tape artwork by local designer and illustrator Bernardo Bagulho, perfectly mirrors the ordered chaos below.


This is a sketcher’s paradise. I tried to highlight the particular charm of Fonte de Letras using some discreet collage (the store’s advertising leaflet featuring Pessoa and a clipping from a Portuguese-language Manga catalogue) balanced by a limited colour palette. Pessoa reaches into his fluid brain for inspiration, his hand resting on the manuscript, while Tokyo Ghoul dangles his smartphone and touches his temple in slightly perplexed distraction.


With such a complex scene, I started with a thumbnail in ‘Mr Blumke’ (my pocket notebook) to work out how much I could realistically include, and then once I had some main lines down, attacked the sketchbook with the two selected collage pieces using PVA glue (cola branca). The beauty of urban collage is the vitality of decision-making and its resulting design, where sketched lines dance with the printed fragments at almost improvised speed.

Sem comentários: