2003-2005 Drawings / Paintings

I arrived on a bright June morning in the ‘white’ city of Lisboa with only a few bags, an iMac, and some money in my savings account. If I was a millennial, Richard Florida would have written his seminal book “The Rise of the Creative Class” just for me. A new breed of creatives that are mobile and work from anywhere in the world through the newly available digital channels on the Internet. The so-called digital nomads. Unfortunately, I am slightly older.  I would say somewhere on the verge of a Generation Xer and a Baby Boomer. Anyway, who cares about being stuffed in a generation box?

Lisbon was a great source of inspiration for me. You can almost feel the presence of poets and writers like Fernando Pessoa, or José Saramago, sitting on a stool next to you in one of the old ‘tascas’ sipping on a glass of very young (Vinho Verde) or very old (Porto) wine. The city has an atmosphere that is truly phenomenal and extremely graphical. The first year I lived in an area called the ‘Barrio Alto’, or the high neighborhood. A maze of little streets on a hill with a plethora of small bars and restaurants left and right. At night these streets fill up with thousands of noisy youngsters looking for fun. A few years later I moved to the ‘Mouraria’ neighborhood, the old Moorish quarter. This was the neighborhood Amalia Rodrigues sang about with that ‘saudade’ in her beautiful warm voice. The area was also known to be a bit seedy and not very safe. Every night when I returned home from work I would leave the metro station at the Martim Moniz square, to discover a striking tableau of people, as plucked straight from a Fellini movie (sometimes from a Tod Browning movie). There they would sit frozen in a colorfully staged screenshot.

In 2003, I packed, stored, or sold all my belongings and moved to Lisbon, Portugal.