A Kiss in Dublin

I have already published in this blog diverse new art works inspired by statues and sculptures seen in Dublin, Ireland, during my last painting trip in April 2013. Here is my most recent one, which I just finished:

“The Kiss”

Now there are many kisses paintings in the world, the most famous and one of my favourite ones being by Gustav Klimt. In cases like this, I always wonder if it is worth adding another piece to a large collection, asking myself what is the point and if I shouldn’t rather use my creative energy in painting something nobody else painted… but I loved that statue, and I simply could not resist!

Just browsing the net to find out who the sculptor is, I found this wonderful review:

“… Rowan Gillespie’s artwork is scattered all around the city. He is an international renowned sculptor and a lot of his work is made in Blackrock Dublin.

This is probably my favourite sculpture of his and stands opposite the National Concert Hall. It’s so romantic to me! Yes I am a softie, but there is something magical about it. A piece of human warmth cast in bronze situated in an impersonal part of the city. It just reminds you of what is important and lasts beyond the materialism.

Although the people having a fag break outside their office looked at me like a mentalist as I stood there admiring it. So if you don’t mind looking a bit daft, have a gander down to it and a stare!..”

The statue itself features the two lovers in full length. What one cannot see on the painting is that the woman is standing on her tiptoes to be able to reach the man’s mouth, which one can perhaps guess, seeing how much she has to extend her neck! A wonderful, very emotional position…

The painting presented in this post is available directly online as Giclee print in many different dimensions, on paper, canvas or metal, and also as greeting cards. Please click on the widget below to access my Shopping Cart Online. 

The Giclee prints from the above mentioned Online shop are manufactured in the USA and sent directly to the client from there. For personal or financial reasons it might not be appropriate for everybody to order their prints in the USA. Also, you might prefer to purchase my Giclee prints hand-signed. If so, you can alternatively order directly from me. Simply contact me indicating which painting you are interested in and in which size. Go to Goodaboom Boutique to see a guideline of pricing for different dimensions.

I also sell A3 posters (297mm x 420mm) as high quality digital prints on a Heavyweight White 350gsm paper, each packed in cello with card stiffner.

Poster Price: 50 euros.

They are a great alternative to the Giclee prints, to a more affordable price.

(the prices for the Giclee prints and posters are not including packing&shipping)

Hand-signed prints incur a surcharge of 30 euros.

Oscar Wilde in Dublin

To be natural is simply a pose…

My last post in this blog was about Phil Lynott, how “I met” him at his grave. I was describing the pain I suffered intensely visiting the cemetery where he is buried, related to the recent and sudden death of my brother… Well, I just found out that the object of this post today, Oscar Wilde, is somehow very related to my brother too, even if not in the happiest way: they are both buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris! I wished I had known that as I walked through the Père Lachaise in February, but on the other hand, I doubt I would have been in the mood to search for his grave, which is why I renounced to searching for Jim Morrison and many other celebrities buried there…

Anyway, here he is, almost alive, Oscar Wilde in Dublin.

This watercolour painting was inspired by a tribute statue seen in Dublin’s Merrion Square park . I will quote here the words I just found in the net and which I find very good:

“… This may be the only statue in the history of statues both to totally capture the subject’s personality and do to it in a way that would have amused the hell out of him. What a portrait!

Across the walkway are two square marble columns covered in Wilde witticisms. The words are carved into the marble in a way that looks like Wilde’s original handwriting, making it look like graffiti from a distance. One column is topped with a small sculpture of a kneeling woman, and the other of man’s torso, both of which seem ill-fitting with the rest of the installation. But the rest of it is so perfect that I don’t even care.

The sculptor is Danny Osborne. The marker says it was commissioned by the Guinness Ireland Group and unveiled on October 28, 1997… “

The woman in the painting above is “the kneeling woman” the person is referring too. I do agree with her criticism of “ill-fitting with the rest of the installation”, but I do love the subject as a painting motif. Especially with the quote …

The paintings of Oscar Wilde presented in this gallery, and many more music paintings, are available directly online as Giclee print in many different dimensions, on paper, canvas or metal, and also as greeting cards. Please click on the widget below to access my Shopping Cart Online.

The Giclee prints from the above mentioned Online shop are manufactured in the USA and sent directly to the client from there. For personal or financial reasons it might not be appropriate for everybody to order their prints in the USA. Also, you might prefer to purchase my Giclee prints hand-signed. If so, you can alternatively order directly from me. Simply contact me indicating which painting you are interested in and in which size. Go to

Goodaboom Boutique

to see a guideline of pricing for different dimensions.

 

I also sell A3 posters (297mm x 420mm) as high quality digital prints on a Heavyweight White 350gsm paper, each packed in cello with card stiffner.

Poster Price: 50 euros.

They are a great alternative to the Giclee prints, to a more affordable price.

(the prices for the Giclee prints and posters are not including packing&shipping)

Hand-signed prints incur a surcharge of 30 euros.

Phil Lynott in Howth

Live and Dangerous…

Before I went to Ireland last month (April 2013) I hardly knew anything about Phil Lynott. To be honest I only knew one song by him, “The Boys are Back in Town”, and this only because my partner, Kev Moore, had, in the 90′s, impersonated him on the UK TV show ‘Stars in their Eyes’. But I did know that Phil had always played a special role in Kevin’s life.

Now I know Phil better… unfortunately my first “real” meeting with him was at his grave. Kevin had found out that Phil was buried on the peninsula of Howth, to the north of Dublin Bay. Although we had checked on the net where exactly the cemetery was, we could not find it at once, drove a long way around the area it was supposed to be and finally asked a local. As we eventually entered the cemetery, I felt how emotional Kevin was. And me too… but not for the same reason. My reason was that some weeks ago I had suddenly lost my beloved brother Claude. From Spain we had flown to the burial in Paris.. it had nearly killed me… And since then, I can’t enter a cemetery any more. Certainly very unusual for me, as I normally love to visit cemeteries, especially in foreign countries: I feel the way the living people treat their dead speaks volumes about them. Anyway, I thought I would make an exception for Phil Lynott and we started searching for his grave. Three times we went through all the graves, reading carefully all the names, with method even, and I must admit that in that very moment I felt some stress towards my partner to put me through this. Of course he could not know how I felt, but forcing me to face the sadness of all these people having lost their beloved mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and children was much too much for me. Eventually I went to him and begged him to ask somebody where Phil Lynott’s grave was. He didn’t like it, not finding it very cool and rock’n roll, but seeing my sad little face, he agreed. Good job he did, as we were looking in the totally wrong place, in the old part of the cemetery.

If you want to read about that grave visit from the perspective of Kev Moore, please go to his site and read “In Search of Phil”.

I present here the second of my new collaboration works with Kevin, a more or less caricatural portrait of Phil gigging in Howth. Don’t miss the warning in the background:

“Live and Dangerous!”

which applies not only to the cliffs of Howth’s coast, but also of course to Thin Lizzy’s live masterpiece!

The painting of the Beatles presented in this gallery, and many more music paintings, are available directly online as Giclee print in many different dimensions, on paper, canvas or metal, and also as greeting cards. Please click on the widget below to see dimensions available and corresponding prices.

The Giclee prints from the above mentioned Online shop are manufactured in the USA and sent directly to the client from there. For personal or financial reasons it might not be appropriate for everybody to order their prints in the USA. Also, you might prefer to purchase my Giclee prints hand-signed. If so, you can alternatively order directly from me. Simply contact me indicating which painting you are interested in and in which size. Go to Goodaboom Boutique to see a guideline of pricing for different dimensions.

I also sell A3 posters (297mm x 420mm) as high quality digital prints on a Heavyweight White 350gsm paper, each packed in cello with card stiffner.

Poster Price: 50 euros.

They are a great alternative to the Giclee prints, to a more affordable price.

(the prices for the Giclee prints and posters are not including packing&shipping)

Hand-signed prints incur a surcharge of 30 euros.

The Beatles in Ireland

And there they were…

It was Sunday the 28th of April 2013, and we were wandering through the streets of Swords, just North of Dublin, Ireland, killing time before we had to drive to the airport to board our plane back to Spain, after a 10 days cultural, musical and artistic trip.

And suddenly, there they were, sitting behind a window in a back street: The Beatles! A wonderful encounter… funny was they they all had some kind of Phil Lynott look!

I normally don’t like caricatures, they are often unkind and tend to ridicule the subject. But I like this one, it is funny and tender, I think… The real Beatles fans will I hope forgive me if the guitars are not exactly true to life.

The painting of the Beatles presented in this gallery, and many more music paintings, are available directly online as Giclee print in many different dimensions, on paper, canvas or metal, and also as greeting cards. Please click on the widget below to access my Shopping Cart Online.

The Giclee prints from the above mentioned Online shop are manufactured in the USA and sent directly to the client from there. For personal or financial reasons it might not be appropriate for everybody to order their prints in the USA. Also, you might prefer to purchase my Giclee prints hand-signed. If so, you can alternatively order directly from me. Simply contact me indicating which painting you are interested in and in which size. Go to Goodaboom Boutique to see a guideline of pricing for different dimensions.

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I also sell A3 posters (297mm x 420mm) as high quality digital prints on a Heavyweight White 350gsm paper, each packed in cello with card stiffner.

Poster Price: 50 euros.

They are a great alternative to the Giclee prints, to a more affordable price.

(the prices for the Giclee prints and posters are not including packing&shipping)

Hand-signed prints incur a surcharge of 30 euros.

Birds and Flowers from Paradise

Watercolour Paintings

According to my opinion, Paradise exists only within our heads. Hell too. I say “only” even if I think that the best and the worst which can happen to a human being is to have Paradise or Hell in his own head. Anyway, I called this blog post “Birds and Flowers from Paradise”, because I simply invented these birds and flowers. And they appeared from my fantasy in a moment when I felt happy…

To have Paradise in one’s own head can take many forms. To me it often translates in colours, mainly warm colours -reds, oranges, yellows – and an irresistible need to freely spread them on the paper. With some stains of greens and blues among them, for the contrast. In the above painting the bird could be a blackbird; as I painted it, I felt the urge to put some black among the vibrant colours, and this is how the bird’s head suddenly appeared. Perhaps was it to be remembered, at least unconsciously, that even in the middle of Paradise, Hell is never far away. As to the flower, one could think first of a tulip, but honestly: doesn’t it look much more like a strawberry? Yes, there are not only apples in Paradise!

The above painting was in fact the first I painted during that recent ascension to Paradise. There were three of them, the three I present in this blog. This one is softer, less violent than the one at the top of the post, with more pastel colours and less contrasts. Probably was I in the middle of the ascension process still, not having arrived yet, and life was all peace. Because if you think that Paradise itself is a haven of peace, well, it isn’t! It is as violent as Hell, just in a positive sense…

This last one was the second I painted, the arrival to Paradise probably, full of surprises and wonders. The flower looks like some kind of thistle, I would say. By the way, concerning thistles: I just read that it was one of the favourite plants of one my famous compatriots, Théophile Gautier, French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic . When I say compatriot, he is more than that: Théophile Gautier was born in the same town as me, Tarbes, in the French Pyrenees, and, as a child, I even went to a school bearing his name. Thanks to my new electronic book, I have now easy access to French books and I have rediscovered that author, reading his delicious and very instructive book “Travel to Spain”. There he says that his favourite plants are thistles and palm trees. I don’t believe though that he would have loved my painted thistle, judging by the paintings he describes and loves. In those days – XIXth century- one loved more detailed and more realistic paintings. I suppose. But I would have been curious to see his reaction in front of these kind of free watercolours and read what he has to say about it, as I really enjoyed his paintings descriptions of the Spanish and other masters (Goya, El Greco, etc). Well, I’d better stop now, because if I start thinking of what isn’t possible any more in my life, I will rapidly end up in a breathtakingly steep descent to Hell, and this post here is only about Paradise..

The birds paintings presented in this gallery are available directly online as Giclee print in many different dimensions, on paper or canvas, and also as greeting cards, in my FAA Gallery. Please press the link below to access it.

Buy prints online!

The Giclee prints from the above mentioned Online shop are manufactured in the USA and sent directly to the client from there. For personal or financial reasons it might not be appropriate for everybody to order their prints in the USA. Also, you might prefer to purchase my Giclee prints hand-signed. If so, you can alternatively order directly from me. Simply contact me indicating which painting you are interested in and in which size. Go to Goodaboom Boutique to see a guideline of pricing for different dimensions.

Happy Valentine’s Day 05: Valentine’s Menagerie

“Valentine’s Menagerie”

Funny Paintings to celebrate Valentine’s Day

Thinking one cannot begin too soon to celebrate love, I recently started a series of blog posts featuring paintings created especially for Valentine’s Day. The last one I presented in this blog was

“Love Explosion”

Today I am happy to introduce

“Valentine’s Menagerie”

- Valentine’s Menagerie 01, watercolour and ink -

The idea came from a series of funny sketches I did in Lanzarote, some of them representing cats, dogs and giraffes with crazy markings. I thought I could create a series for Valentines, featuring these animals with markings on their skin, such as cats, cows, giraffes, leopards, etc, but with a difference – giving them heart-shaped markings and bringing them together under the lovely name of “Valentine’s Menagerie”.

I started with the cows… in the painting above, the bull was inspired by a little sculpture of a red bull seen in Lanzarote. The tattoo “I Love You” is replacing the usual breeders’ brand on fighting bulls. His tail ends in a rose for his Valentine, the cute cow with grass for hair and who shapes the end of her tail into a heart……

- Valentine’s Menagerie 02, watercolour and pencil -

These cows in love are more of an established couple. No need for flirting and asking out any more, it is clear who will be his Valentine… a little bit like my partner and me… in fact I recognise us very well in that painting, especially myself, could really be a self-portrait!

I hope the Valentine’s Menagerie will grow, but it might take time and need some very special and long breeding…

This painting, and also other paintings to celebrate Valentine’s Day, are available directly online as Giclee print in many different dimensions, on paper, canvas and metal, and also as greeting cards. Please click on the button below to access

my FAA store

The Giclee prints from the above mentioned Online shop are manufactured in the USA and sent directly to the client from there. For personal or financial reasons it might not be appropriate for everybody to order their prints in the USA. Also, you might prefer to purchase my Giclee prints hand-signed. If so, you can alternatively order directly from me. Simply contact me indicating in which size. Go to

Goodaboom Boutique

to see a guideline of pricing for different dimensions.

 

I also sell A3 posters (297mm x 420mm) as high quality digital prints on a Heavyweight White 350gsm paper, each packed in cello with card stiffener.

Poster Price: 50 euros.

They are a great alternative to the Giclee prints, to a more affordable price.

(the price does not include packing&shipping)

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Painting Lanzarote 05: The Beaches

I have already published some posts about several places from Lanzarote, such as Arrecife, Puerto Carmen, Teguise. Today I want to show you the beaches from Lanzarote, which were really wonderful.

I am certainly not a beach person, in the sense that I never spend time lying on a beach and sun bathing. But I do like to spend time walking on sand along a beautiful beach, watching the waves and all the stuff they bring back to shore from wherever, always hoping to find a message in a bottle amongst all the flotsam and jetsam!

I unfortunately don’t remember where I painted the above beach, having forgotten to write it down behind the painting as I usually do on site. But I think it was in the North-West of the island, by a small fishing village called “Caleta de Famara” which has achieved worldwide renown as a surfers paradise. The next watercolour sketch of a surfer entering the sea with his surf board under the arm was certainly done there.

… another sketch of the beach there, in ink and watercolour… as you can see, much movement, in the air and in the sea!

I have done more paintings and sketches from there, and if you are interested in seeing them, simply go to my Lanzarote Gallery.

If you want to read more about that place, not only its beaches and surfing community, but also about the village itself and its sandy streets, please go to the Lanzarote Guide Book.

Let us go to another beach now, almost on the opposite side of the island, by Playa Blanca at the most southerly tip.

I witnessed this scene on one of the Papagayo Beaches and called it ‘Back home late”. It looked as if a father went out for a walk with his little boy on his shoulders and forgot the time and came back very late to an angry wife…

Anyway Papagayo Beache, Playas de Papagayo, is a collection of natural beaches to the east of Playa Blanca and are in an area protected from development. They conceal the most beautiful natural beaches in Lanzarote, which slope gently towards a crystal clear sea. The following watercolour and ink sketch is one of these beaches, seen from above.

Playa Blanca itself has some different beaches too, the most popular being Playa Flamingo to the west and Playa Dorada to the east. I didn’t paint them though, choosing to paint some other subjects from the place. But what I did sketch is one of the tiny private beaches attached to some of the best hotels there

They are not really beaches at such, at least not natural beaches. Simply little areas demarcated with the typical local black lava stones and covered with sand, sun beds and cute straw umbrellas, overlooking the sea along the coastal promenade.

Let us go back to the East now, between Arrecife and Puerto Carmen, to Playa Honda, with its lovely golden sand. I guess many people will go elsewhere because it is mostly directly under the flight path of Arrecife airport, but personally I found it very romantic with its little fishermens’ boats and tiny white houses on the beach itself.

On the sketch above, the sand isn’t golden though… rather green! Don’t ask me why, I don’t know what was going through my brain and hands as I painted it, but let us call it “artistic freedom”. Sometimes I feel like not wanting at all to paint the real colours of nature, and this is was probably one of these moments…

This one is a little more faithful to the golden reality of Playa Honda and yet not quite. But well, apparently the closest I could deal with reality that day, as all my sketches from the place have some kind of weird colours…

Here is a view of the beach in Puerto Carmen, a very ‘touristic’ place with the typical beach and sea promenade of Spanish tourist resorts!

Just not as crowded as one would perhaps expect , but well, it was the beginning of December. And although some normally sun-deprived English people couldn’t help but having a sunbathe and even a bathe in the sea, most of the tourists were walking along the promenade or sitting in the hundreds of lovely beach cafes.

I will finish with a quite impressionist motif of one of the many beaches from Arrecife, the capital. That beach was kind of inside the town, and half of the time almost covered with water because of the tides. An extremely attractive subject for me, especially because of the boats

There are many more wonderful beaches in Lanzarote, but I could not paint them all, needing time to paint all the other wonderful stuff from Lanzarote.

These paintings of beaches from Lanzarote, as well as many others of Lanzarote, are available directly online as Giclee print in many different dimensions, on paper, canvas and metal, and also as greeting cards. Please click on the button below to access

my FAA store

 

The Giclee prints from the above mentioned Online shop are manufactured in the USA and sent directly to the client from there. For personal or financial reasons it might not be appropriate for everybody to order their prints in the USA. Also, you might prefer to purchase my Giclee prints hand-signed. If so, you can alternatively order directly from me. Simply contact me indicating in which size. Go to

Goodaboom Boutique

to see a guideline of pricing for different dimensions.

I also sell A3 posters (297mm x 420mm) as high quality digital prints on a Heavyweight White 350gsm paper, each packed in cello with card stiffener.

Poster Price: 50 euros.

They are a great alternative to the Giclee prints, to a more affordable price.

(the price does not include packing&shipping)

Happy Valentine’s Day 04: Love Explosion

“Love Explosion”

A Painting to celebrate Valentine’s Day

Thinking one cannot begin too soon to celebrate love, I recently started a series of blog posts featuring paintings created especially for Valentine’s Day. The last one I presented in this blog was

“A Frog in Love”

Today I am happy to present to you

“Love Explosion”

To be honest, this painting was never meant to be a painting! In fact, I had just received some painting materials ordered from Germany for my next painting trip in February 2013. Among other things, there was a beautiful box of big Chinese watercolour trays and some project paper blocks in square format. The paper is probably better suitable to be used with dry techniques, but I wanted to see how it reacted to watercolour. When I go on a painting trip, especially when I go by plane, I prefer to travel light, I don’t fancy carrying big and heavy watercolour blocks with me , my travel artwork being mostly sketch and drawing in ink with a little bit of watercolours. Sometimes, drawing paper allows me to reach interesting unusual effects. So there I was yesterday, putting some Chinese red stains on the paper, and I liked it at once, not only the paint itself – more vivid than normal watercolour – but also the way the paints interacted with the paper, without seeping into it much though. Better not to take much water on the brushes, but when one knows, great! I then tried Chinese yellow, then Chinese green, and soon, convinced that the new material was good, I stopped.

Some hours later my partner Kev Moore, who had given me the paints as a Christmas gift, asked me how they were and I showed him my piece of paper with the stains. He said:

“Oh, this is very beautiful!”

I was surprised, but then I started looking at the paper and the colour with new eyes, and suddenly flowers, hearts and birds appeared on the paper. I then spent some minutes to enhance the stains a little bit, and soon it was there, this explosion of love. I must say I am quite happy with it…

This painting, and also other paintings to celebrate Valentine’s Day, are available directly online as Giclee print in many different dimensions, on paper, canvas and metal, and also as greeting cards. Please click on the button below to access

my FAA store

 

The Giclee prints from the above mentioned Online shop are manufactured in the USA and sent directly to the client from there. For personal or financial reasons it might not be appropriate for everybody to order their prints in the USA. Also, you might prefer to purchase my Giclee prints hand-signed. If so, you can alternatively order directly from me. Simply contact me indicating in which size. Go to

Goodaboom Boutique

to see a guideline of pricing for different dimensions.

I also sell A3 posters (297mm x 420mm) as high quality digital prints on a Heavyweight White 350gsm paper, each packed in cello with card stiffener.

Poster Price: 50 euros.

They are a great alternative to the Giclee prints, to a more affordable price.

(the price does not include packing&shipping)

 

A Map and A Mule

A Peace Story of Queen Isabel of Portugal

“A Map and A Mule”… isn’t it an interesting combination of words? Well, this is certainly what I thought when Eric Timar contacted me the first time, in October 2012, asking if a certain painting of mine would be available for a book cover.

“Hello Miki — would it be possible to get a jpeg version of Serpa Portugal 27, in order to use it in a book? This will be a children’s book about Queen Isabel of Portugal. Queen Isabel helped draw the border of Portugal, and one town in question was Serpa, and there I see your painting . . . thank you…”

I get contacted regularly from people and companies wanted to use my paintings for many different projects, but I especially loved this one. I love books, I love children’s stories and this one seemed very original to me! I accepted, and had to do a little bit work on it according to Eric’s wishes:

“… There are many other towns that were affected by the border that Isabel helped create, but I am picking Serpa as a focus since it will be easy for American parents and children to pronounce …A couple of other issues: Since I want to show Serpa as it might have looked in 1297, I would have to use only the portion of the piece that does not have antennas (unfortunately). That means I would crop out the right of the piece. Would that be okay?”

As Eric said: unfortunately. I really did not want to crop the painting because of some antennas, and I proposed to take the antennas down. As I explained to him, I often have to do similar work on some paintings to make them exactly fit the requirements. Some people might think that it is like selling my soul, but personally I love to do that, it gives the painting a totally new life. So, I took the antennas down, and then we started speaking about the back cover. And this how, as one idea followed another, not only the antennas were down, but a tiny little woman riding a mule appeared in the painting…

… and became the star of the back cover!

The book is published now, out on Amazon, and I have even received my personally dedicated copy from Eric. It really is a lovely book, and I am glad to be part of it.

Also, I remember exactly when I did that painting.We were in our Boomobile (our atelier and music studio on wheels) on a painting trip through Portugal, we had come through Serpa by accident and liked it so much that we had decided to stay there until the end of the trip. I drew a lot in this place, and this one especially was made on the outskirts of Serpa, while we were on a bike ride. I remember exactly me sitting on the ground in front of that beautiful town and thinking how lucky I was to be able to witness and paint all that. But I would have never imagined that this sketch would one day, more then 3 years later, make the cover of an American children’s book! Life is so full of surprises, it is wonderful!

Eric has even set up a beautiful Facebook page for “A Map and A Mule”, so please feel free to go there and to like it!

This painting, and also many other paintings from Serpa and Portugal in general, are available directly online as Giclee print in many different dimensions, on paper, canvas and metal, and also as greeting cards. Please click on the button below to access my

FAA store

 

The Giclee prints from the above mentioned Online shop are manufactured in the USA and sent directly to the client from there. For personal or financial reasons it might not be appropriate for everybody to order their prints in the USA. Also, you might prefer to purchase my Giclee prints hand-signed. If so, you can alternatively order directly from me. Simply contact me indicating in which size. Go to

Goodaboom Boutique

to see a guideline of pricing for different dimensions.

I also sell A3 posters (297mm x 420mm) as high quality digital prints on a Heavyweight White 350gsm paper, each packed in cello with card stiffener.

Poster Price: 50 euros.

They are a great alternative to the Giclee prints, to a more affordable price.

(the price does not include packing&shipping)

Painting Lanzarote 04: Toy Stories

I certainly don’t belong to that group of women who love shopping: in fact I hate it! By ‘shopping’, I mean wandering around and through the main commercial streets downtown and spending hours making “Leche-vitrines”, as we so fittingly call it in France: licking shop windows.

But it was different in Lanzarote, I did enjoy it a lot. Not that the stuff they sold was more attractive to me, but everything was presented in a way that delighted my eyes, and I had loads of fun looking at everything. And licking these windows, I came to the idea of this watercolour and ink series of “Toy Stories in Lanzarote”. Some of the motifs I chose were simply toys (it was not long before Christmas, so toys were everywhere), others were little art-crafts objects in souvenir and art shops.

I called this first one “Cat Town”. The cats were little wooden or ceramics sculptures, I don’t remember exactly. And what I have painted in the background as the cat houses, were in reality the cardboard boxes in which you got the cats when you bought them. I thought it was a funny idea…

I think, what inspired me in all these objects, was the playfulness with colours and shapes. The colours I painted are probably not very faithful to the original ones, as I added them later at the hotel to the original ink sketches made on the site. But the impression is certainly right, that stuff was incredibly colourful and funny. And although it is quite kitschy, I did love the camel: you might have noticed it, but the clock in the background, on the left side, with the typical black lava stones from Lanzarote around it, is the camel’s back!

These dogs and giraffe were not even sketched on the site. They were standing inside a kind of posh souvenir art shop, which, along with the assistants, seemed to give off the vibe -mainly because of the prices…- that they would not appreciate it if I just stood there and sketched. I did that painting totally from memory later on , and I really have no idea if they looked very much like that. And now, almost two months later, I just remember that the main dog was made out of wood, and was very big, and the giraffe probably too…

“The Three Graces from Lanzarote and The Bull” was also inspired by sculptures seen in the posh shop mentioned above, and drawn from memory. I have no idea why they were selling a red bull in a souvenir shop: Lanzarote belongs to Spain, and Spain is well-known for its bulls, but I don’t know if there are really bulls in Lanzarote. I don’t even know if they practise bullfighting. I certainly never saw a bullring. In fact I didn’t even see any cows when I was there, and I did travel through the whole island!

These first 3 paintings were based on artcraft, Let us go to the toys now.

I saw these two cute bears in a shop window in Arrecife, the capital of Lanzarote. The scene touched me very deeply: I had just received some terrible family news and was crying all the time. These 2 bears reminded me so much of my partner -the English Rocker Kev Moore- so kindly and tenderly trying to comfort me. A little insider’s info for you: Kevin calls me “Rosa Baby”, because I love the colour pink. This is why I strongly identified with the sad pink bear…

And back to happiness and fun now, a toy story of swinging monkeys witnessing the beginning of a love affair between a doll and a cat.

And here is a last one for now, another love story between a doll, her ducks and a jealous little dog.

I could have gone on and on with painting all these cute little things, but if I did so, I feared I would not be taken seriously any more as an artist… I loved doing them though, and painting is for me, more than anything, a way of making a big party out of my life! So, between us: I don’t really care if I am taken seriously or not, as long as I enjoy what I do!

These paintings, as well as many others of Lanzarote, are available directly online as Giclee print in many different dimensions, on paper, canvas and metal, and also as greeting cards. Please click on the button below to access my

FAA store

The Giclee prints from the above mentioned Online shop are manufactured in the USA and sent directly to the client from there. For personal or financial reasons it might not be appropriate for everybody to order their prints in the USA. Also, you might prefer to purchase my Giclee prints hand-signed. If so, you can alternatively order directly from me. Simply contact me indicating in which size. Go to

Goodaboom Boutique

to see a guideline of pricing for different dimensions.

I also sell A3 posters (297mm x 420mm) as high quality digital prints on a Heavyweight White 350gsm paper, each packed in cello with card stiffener.

Poster Price: 50 euros.

They are a great alternative to the Giclee prints, to a more affordable price.

(the price does not include packing&shipping)

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