The last time I saw my grandmother alive was in May of 1998. I had not seen her since moving back to Lisbon in the summer of 1993 to restart my university career, this time in Fine Arts, after the useless and expensive couple of years I had cost my father whilst in London at […]

Read more "Sol y Sombra"

There is an interesting documentary called “The Secrets of Pickpockets”, originally aired on Channel 4 and now available on Youtube, that explains some of the tricks scam-artists get up to and the mechanics of how they operate. Most of the action takes place in London and a large part of the documentary is devoted to […]

Read more "Sketch: Artistas, turistas y carteristas"

If there were two places in my first years at boarding school that I naturally sought as sanctuary from the quasi-institutionalized feral rough and tumble that we were subjected to, one would have been the Art School and the other the School Library. The library was large and very well stocked by any standards of […]

Read more "Oasis"

George Orwell once likened advertising to the rattling of a stick in a swill bucket. I can think of plenty of friends of mine who might strongly disagree with him – for personal or professional reasons – but he may well have been on to something…once again. At the very least his frase invokes a […]

Read more "On rolling in the muck"

Lieutenant Joseph Guy went over the top at Passchendaele with the rest of his unit,  a  battalion of The Green Howards, on a grey wet day in October of 1917, and was shot in the chest at some point as he lead other brave men of his regiment from the British lines towards the German […]

Read more "Joseph Guy"

It had been something of a hard summer for all of us in various ways. The powers-that-be had been driving us hard in their endless pursuit of quantifiable objectives and we were all getting a bit tired, finding ourselves considerably undermanned for the tasks at hand. Then Raphael went and got himself in trouble by […]

Read more "Flavio"

Twelve or thirteen years ago, over dinner with a large group of friends and other friends of friends, I was asked earnestly – and quite out of the blue – by a young woman I had only just met what, in my opinion, might differentiate comercial art from fine art and which one of the […]

Read more "On being put on the spot"

Lolo arrived at Prudenci’s not long after Claudia had started working there, perhaps sometime in the spring of 2005. Prudenci ran a jeweler’s workshop and gallery on Carrer dels Ases in El Born and one day a young black tabby with a small white patch on his chest came running in, never to leave. We […]

Read more "Sketch:Lolo"

I no longer recall if I saw this on TED or if it was on some other site. The talk was about letting go of  emotional baggage – for one’s own well-being more than anything else – and I seem to remember that the point was illustrated by the speaker asking the audience to invoke […]

Read more "Sketch: Glass"

A national institution; they are everywhere. I no longer remember the exact figure – I could easily look it up – but last I knew they have three hundred (plus) points of sale nationwide alone. A monstrous cephalopod of its kind, the corporation has gobbled up other similar businesses over the last thirty years and […]

Read more "Sketch: El Castro Fiel"