Guinness Gives You A Lift

The Irish Art of Levitating

As we went to Dublin in April 2013, one of my plans was to drink a pint of Guinness beer while listening to traditional Irish music in a typical Irish pub. If I remember well, I have had only one Guinness before in my life, and it was in an Irish bar in Gibraltar. Well, in Dublin I had to wait until the last day to get my beer -which I enjoyed very much by the way, the look as well as the taste- Unfortunately at the time of the day I had it, no Irish music was available to listen to. And the one evening we spent in Dublin, after having attended a gig by German metal rock musician Michael Schenker, nearly all the pubs were closed! A very frustrating experience…

Nevertheless, Guinness was omnipresent in Dublin and its surroundings, as one might expect, and mainly in the form of funny adverts which I really liked. The ‘vintage’ Guinness adverts from a bygone era were reproduced everywhere. As I saw that street performer – and I am sure that many people who visited Dublin will have seen him and, judging by the look in their eyes, wondered how in the hell he was managing it! – Anyway, as I saw him levitating, surrounded by a circle of little orange cones, I had the idea for the painting above, something of an amalgam of the images that assaulted my senses in the Irish capital, Guinness, crazy street performers, and more Guinness…

The painting presented in this gallery, and many more Ireland paintings, are available directly online as Giclee print in many different dimensions, on paper, canvas or metal, and also as greeting cards. Please “click here to purchase” from 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.

Willie Nelson

Portraits of the American Country Singer and Guitarist

I will have to make a confession here, something I am really not proud of: I knew nothing about Willie Nelson until very recently. And when I say nothing, I mean that I didn’t even know about his existence!

In my defence I will state that my musical culture is 95% the responsibility of my partner, the English rock musician Kev Moore. And him being a passionate rocker, country music is not exactly his thing: wouldn’t look cool anyway if he liked it! And this is how it came to be that Willie Nelson was never presented to me. How then did I come to meet him? Well, in the most unexpected way: I was watching an episode of the USA TV show “Monk” the other day, the episode called “Mr Monk and The Red-Headed Stranger “. There, Monk’s favourite singer, Willie Nelson, playing himself, was wrongly suspected of murdering his tour manager, and of course Monk stepped in to clear his name. To thank him, at the end of the episode, Willie sang a song at the graveside of Mr Monk’s late wife. A very touching scene! Anyway I loved that guy, the way he looked, acted, and more than anything: the way he sang and played guitar: a perfect model for my music art.

I browsed around a little bit in Youtube to see him performing and enjoyed immensely what I saw. I was especially touched by a performance he did with Keith Richards, from the Rolling Stones, Keith playing the acoustic guitar and singing too. The proof, Mr Moore, that liking Willie Nelson is not uncool at all, not even for a rocker!

As I had finished the above artwork, I thought that it would also make a nice portrait of Willie Nelson alone. So I cut Keith Richards away , and did some work in Photoshop, playing around with the colours. This is how Willie suddenly got a blue skin: suits him well I would say!

The paintings of Willie Nelson presented in this gallery, and many more musician portraits, are available directly online as Giclee print in many different dimensions, on paper or canvas, and also as greeting cards, in my

FAA Gallery

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.

 

 

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.

Painting Tenerife: San Cristobal de La Laguna 01

In February 2013, I spent 3 weeks painting the Canary Island Tenerife. My first two posts about that island were referring to places called “Los Gigantes” and “Garachico”. Today I will present here some watercolour and ink sketches from San Cristobal de la Laguna, a town in the Northern part of the island.

We had visited the capital, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the day before and were a little bit disappointed by most of the town. Then I had read that San Cristobal was the former capital and that La Laguna’s historical centre was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1999. Consequently, I thought that there might be some interesting motifs for me.

Unfortunately it was quite a grey and even rainy day and the light cast on the town really wasn’t motivating me to paint. As we began meandering through the town, I became worried that in fact it wasn’t going to present me with anything interesting at all, but as we happened upon the bustling Sunday market, I quickly found a number of motifs, the first ones being quite funny. I did the ink drawings on the site, adding the colours later at home. The first one represents a fish stand.

To be honest, I hate fish. I mean, I hate dead fish, and wherever dead fishes are, I run away, unable to stand the smell and the sight of them. It might be because I was a passionate diver in the past and spent many hours playing with lovely, living fishes in the depths of the seas, that I firmly believe that is where they belong! Anyway, that day I found that motif so funny that I had to draw it. But believe me, I did it very fast, as I gradually started to feel very sick in my tummy. But I understand that true art demands its sacrifices…

You might think that I exaggerated the size of the big fish in the foreground.. perhaps I did… but really, not that much, as it was exactly that which drew my gaze, the contrast between him and the hundreds of little fishes laying in rows behind him. That guy, although dead, really looked for all the world as if he was thinking: “How did I land here?” Which is what I am often thinking about myself on this Earth… that painting could well be a self-portrait!

You might also believe that I invented the next motif… I swear I did not!

So hilarious… and I would have given the world to know what was going on inside the head of the nun… and of the pig! The chickens had lost their heads, so at least they hadn’t any thoughts, presumed chicken usually think with their heads…

What attracted me in the flower stand above, besides the many flowers which I anyway love to paint, was the woman herself. She stood there for a long time, totally immobile. I myself stood quite a while there, sketching and observing, and I could not find out who that woman was. I first thought she was the shop owner, but would she have a bag in her hand if she was? Was she a client? But where was the shop owner then? And why didn’t she move at all? I am not even sure if she was alive!

Later that day, I painted some more motifs from the town itself, as it finally stopped raining and the sun came out, coinciding with our discovery of a pretty part of the town, and I will present these sketches in my next post. But for now let us end with a well-deserved “Churros and Chocolate” treat!

Now, for those who don’t know what Churros are, and still don’t understand it after looking at my sketch, here is what Wikipedia has to say:

“…A churro, sometimes referred to as a Spanish doughnut, is a fried-dough pastry—predominantly choux—based snack. Churros are popular in Spain, France, the Philippines, Portugal, Latin America (including Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands) and the United States. There are two types of churros in Spain, one which is thin (and sometimes knotted) and the other which is long and thick (porra). They are both normally eaten for breakfast dipped in hot chocolate or café con leche….”

Well, these churros from San Cristobal were a killer.. not only in quality but also in quantity!

The paintings of San Cristobal de La Laguna 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 02: Puerto del Carmen

Puerto del Carmen is located on the south-east side of Lanzarote and is among the most important tourist spots on the island. We visited it on different occasions during our 3 weeks stay in Lanzarote. The first time, we had the great -and exhausting! – idea to walk there, starting at our hotel in Arrecife. A combination of beautiful sea promenades and coastal paths wound their way from the capital to our destination, but, oh! it was a long walk! – partly circumnavigating the airport boundary with the excitement of having planes landing and taking off just above our heads. This gave me the opportunity of making a good play on words: seeing so many planes from the UK travel company Thomas Cook continuously landing, one after the other, and thinking of their advertising campaign with the great slogan:

“Don’t just book it, Thomas Cook it!”

I said:

“They obviously overcooked it!”

Anyway, as we eventually reached Puerto del Carmen, I was so tired that I could not do anything else other than consume loads of drinks and food! I could not do one sketch… a very frustrating experience considering that I had gone there to paint.. .. well, at least it had been a healthy day, except for my whole body aching and the headache due to the strong winds we had to fight against.

But we spent the final week of our trip in an hotel from Puerto Carmen, and I had enough occasions to paint then.

Being one of the most important tourist resorts of Lanzarote, I was not expecting too much of the place as I am normally not fond of tourist traffic. But I did love it there, it was something of a revelation to me, there was a wonderful atmosphere, everybody seemed so happy and all restaurants, cafes and shops looked extremely welcoming.

I found the harbour quite attractive and inspiring, and did some sketches there. I especially loved the contrast between the white buildings in the background and the bold coloured boats.

As usual, the sketches have been drawn with an ink pen on the site, and I added the colours later on at the hotel. Most of the time from memory, which might explain why the colours are not especially faithful to reality. They are rather a reflection of my good moods !

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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