Genoa-Lisboa Sketch Connection

March: Baccalà / Março: Bacalhau

This is one of the thousand ways Portuguese have of cooking cod fish, and happens to be my favorite. Gather the ingredients: cod fish, potato, chickpeas, carrots, egg and a choice of your preferred greens (broccoli). Boil everything and serve soaked in olive oil and vinegar. Garlic optional. Simple, effective and tasty!

Genoa-Lisboa Sketch Connection

February: Waterfront / Fevereiro: Beira-mar

The waterfront of Lisboa, on the Tejo river, is 17km long, but for many years, most of it was only partially accessible and difficult to get to. Between shipping containers, port equipment and the railway line along the shore towards the ocean, just a few spots were available to promenade. Nowadays, the city is improving its relationship with the river, and giving the waterfront back to its citizens.

Genoa-Lisboa Sketch Connection

January: Narrow streets / Janeiro: Ruas estreitas

Have you ever lived in an apartment where you could handshake your neighbor from the building across the street? Or even collect their hanging clothes? Narrow streets are a feature of the old parts of both Genova and Lisboa, sometimes even coupled with stairs. In Lisboa, the narrowest alleys can be find the old districts of Castelo, Alfama and Mouraria.

Genoa-Lisboa Sketch Connection

For the next 12 months, Valentina Raiola and I will share with the world the similarities between Genova and Lisboa, through sketches and text, in our blogs and social media. We will each post one sketch per month, each one based on a theme that connects both cities. Think Inktober but less frantic and establishing a bridge between two places and two people.

I saw flashbacks from the 2011 Lisbon Symposium, which, at a distance, looked really tiny. I saw these past ten years that changed my life completely, and I saw the main role that the urban sketchers had in that change!

The all-female media producers EVA are showing the life and work of a few Portuguese Urban Sketchers, in the short Youtube-based webseries Urban Sketchers Journals. Each short episode shows a sketcher in their element, speaking their mind about materials, attitudes and subjects of choic

Carina was lucky to book her time in Lisboa during the Santos, the city festivities. That usually means sketching drunk among heaps of people, ending the night smelling like sweat and grilled sardines – It was a blast of course!

More than a year has passed since these sketches were done. They’re a month apart and are the records of a great year to be a sketcher in Lisboa. In a partnership with the Lisboa, Capital Ibero-americana da Cultura program and the Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva, the Urban Sketchers Portugal was able to bring to the city several sketchers from Portugal, Spain and Latin America for a season of lectures and workshops.

During our lunchtime, Pedro Alves and I, inadvertently, took Richard Aitken, the garden expert, to one of the least gardeny parts of Lisboa – the densely packed Castle district – for a sketch from above.

It was one of those weeks when Lisboa becomes a hub for sketchers around the world.

Oeste Sketchers made the town of Bombarral their site for the global celebration. It couldn’t have been a better location! Sketchers roamed around the beautifully tiled train station and the peculiar Abel Pereira da Fonseca house during the morning.

For my third class as instructor in the Urban Sketchers 10 Years x 10 Classes programme in Lisboa, we went to Campo de Ourique market, a small and cozy building, in an uptown district, that underwent a deep renovation a few years ago, and is now a posh destination to eat and drink in the city.

One thing that relates Poland with Portugal is that they usually show up next to each other in drop-down lists when filling online registration forms.

The challenge was to sketch far and below from a skyscraper. But conventional tall buildings are scarce in this capital city, and not very suitable places to sketch from, so I opted to lead the participants to one of Lisboa’s own alternative skyscrapers – the Nossa Senhora do Monte vantage point.

The charming city in the north is the European Best Destination for the third time in a five-year span. But what has been making it so special for us, sketchers, in the past few months since the national Urban Sketchers gathering in 17-18th of September, is the work that was being done to publish the resulting set of sketches in the book “Porto por/by Urban Sketchers”.

Urban Sketchers Portugal general assembly convened on April 1st. The official annual meeting had a moderate crowd, almost like a family gathering, except that it had powerpoints and spreadsheets.

Urban Sketchers Algarve and the Municipality of Portimão invited us to teach a full-day workshop, and we decided to give a a test run to a programme that we had prepared before. It’s called “The narratives of architecture and the people that experience it“