A personalized walking stick

This is a strong, artistic, personalized walking stick Suzanne offered me. The objects atached refer to my interests when I wander in the fields or the seashore:

How I came to be featured in russian Esquire magazine

On April, 14, 2009, my birthday, I was just expecting to get three or four phone calls from close relatives (I don´t care much for birthdays, mine or other people´s), and it was a complete surprise when the mobile phone rang and a guy from across the Atlantic, from New York City, asked me if I was interested in having some photos of my paintings published in the May issue of russian Esquire magazine. He was a brazilian, the international editions editor for Esquire, and he was contacting me because the russian editors were interested in some of my paintings from the odd planets series, to illustrate an article about an astronaut. I first thought the article was by some russian astronaut, but it turned up to be about the american astronaut Sandra Magnus who spent four months aboard the International Space Station. The actual article consist of entries from the diary she kept while in orbit. The russian editors had seen my paintings in my old death site whose contact wasn´t working anymore (it has been updated). The brazilian guy must have googled my name and found the site and the phone number of a Tourism office in a small town in Portugal where I had an exhibition. It was from them that he got my mobile phone number. Being brazilian sure helped doing the talk.
The russian editors had specific quality requirements for the photos. Two of the paintings were no longer with me: Planet Cabage was in Holand, and Planet Melon was in Porto. I emailed the owners asking them to have the paintings photographed by a professional and the photos sent to me as soon as possible, because I had a very tight schedule. I took Planet Boob, that is still with me, to a professional photographer. I managed to send the photos in time to be published.
The guy in New York sent me a 200 usd check from Hearst Corporation, and promised to get me a couple of issues, as soon as he received them from Moscow.
In May, June, July, I kept visiting the russian Esquire oficial site to see if my paintings were realy published, but the site was not updated. I decided to contact some russians readers in the site forum, and eventualy one sent me photos of the pages in the magazine featuring my paintings. In May I also contacted some friends in London and Amsterdam asking them to search for russian Esquire, but it seems the magazine is not sold outside of russian speaking countries. In September 2009 I finaly received two issues in the mail.
I was very happy that, for a month in 2009, I was a tiny little bit famous in a huge territory that expands from Vilnius to Vladivostok.


That´s Nick Cave in the cover:
Clik photos to enlarge.




On the right it´s writen "Quentin Tarantino":



KOCMOC reads COSMOS, that one I know...





Russian Esquire magazine is famous for a very innovative graphic quality. Notice the fake hairs on this pages:




Notice the elongated legs in this photo of Nick Cave. Latter the same year, ellongated legs in the photo of an american actress published by a western magazine, caused some controversy. But the russians did it first.

Look, another painting from 2006

I started reading a literary critic by Joseph O`Neil on the December 05 "The Atlantic" magazine, and I was so impressed by the first paragraph, found it so well writen, so concise and revealing, that I decided to put it on a painting. I was inspired by those naive, goody two feet pictures with a beautifull landscape and a poem. The little dots in the middle are flocks of birds. Click to enlarge:

A painting from 2006

I like this small painting (20x40cm), though I feel it´s incomplete...

Food from the forest

They say in Autumn you wouldn´t starve in the fields. Plenty of chestnuts, boletus and arbutus-berries.

Lionel and Suzanne´s house

My friends Lionel and Suzanne are two of the nicest, most creative, most read and travelled persons I know. Their house shows how creative they are. Last winter Lionel started making sculpture out of orange peels that he hang from doors and lamps:





Suzanne made a big collage on a wall in the dinning room, with food related photographs. She is the best cook of international cuisine that I know in real life.

The painting on the right is by Paul Bakker:

The sea the sea

Seems so long ago Marianne

Two lamps I made

Notes on the Chilean miners rescue

I suffer from claustrophobia, and so, from the beginning I was very impressed with the news from thirty three Chilean miners trapped so deep underground. I even got nightmares. On October,13 I was up till 4.30 in the morning to watch the first miner come out of the capsule. These events were so impressive, caused such an impact on the consciousness of billions of people, because they can be seen as symbols.
First, the whole rescue effort, the money spent and all the engineering skills involved to save 33 workers, were a display of good old western humanist values, in part inherited from the best in Christianity. Man as the measure of all things. Watching CNN, It was revealing to read the comments that Chinese citizens put on the Internet condemning their government for the poor record of mine disasters in China. One noticed a small but revealing detail: in China, contrary to what he was watching from Chile, when the rescued miners arrived at the surface, they first had to thank the authorities in front of the cameras, before being allowed to meet their family. One summoned it by saying that the images of each one of the 33 miners arriving at the surface was a slap in the face of the Chinese authorities. Humans first... Of course, mining safety regulations in Chile are not perfect, but that fact does not diminish the impact of this extraordinary rescue.
The televised images of the rescue were also a slap in the face of the Islamic radicals that spend huge amount of money to plot the murder of "infidels", humans they do not consider worth living, for some crazy religious reasons. The Chile authorities spent more than 20 million dollars to save 33 ordinary humans, regardless of their religious or political opinions, their virtues or sins. Jacques Brel sang: "Toi, tu n`est pas le bon Dieux, Toi t`est beaucoup plus mieux, Tu es an homme." (You are not the good God, you are much better, you are a man)
The rescue as a rich symbol of rebirth. Downwards, the capsule as a phallic object that penetrates mother Earth. The shelter, 700 meters below, as a womb teaming with life desperate to come out (to be born). Upwards, the capsule as an egg that, in the surface, bursts open to reveal yet another life. The fear of troubles in the delivery always there, a miscarriage, a stillborn... The engineers and workers as the medical team.
Us, hundreds of millions of spectators watching this powerful, emotional metaphor of death and rebirth unfold life in the screen.

Miles Davis Concierto de Aranjuez

Cool cool summer